E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

Harnessing Your Interstitial Time

(Migrated weblog post from LSR)

Over time, you always have got a tendency to get the same types of questions over and over again. Yet, for some of them there are easier ways of finding a solution than for others where it would require some substantial work. Funny thing is that those recurring questions seem to be slightly more complicated every time they come up. And this is what has been happening to me over the last few months. Lots and lots of people have been asking me over and over again how they can go ahead and share their knowledge and collaborate with their peers when they are busy doing something else working on the different projects they may be involved with. The complicated item in here as well is the situation were lots of people think that sharing knowledge is a hardworking activity that would require substantial amount of time and therefore some people think that sharing knowledge is just not worth their time and effort. Boy, are they just so wrong or what?

Sharing knowledge and collaborating with your peers is just an activity you engage with just whenever you have got some free time for it, not when somebody tells you to do so. Sharing knowledge cannot be imposed on anyone, no matter what people say, and cannot be rewarded or incentivised like it is happening in most cases all over the place. Instead, sharing knowledge and collaborating with your peers needs to be encouraged and promoted as an ad-hoc activity for those spare or idle moments in between much more complicated activities. And since lots of people keep on asking me how to get engaged in such a way where they could share their knowledge with little effort but still getting the most out of the experience I just advise them to check out the following weblog post from 43folders: Harnessing your interstitial time.

Harnessing your interstitial time is probably one of the best reads I have come across in months as it clearly puts together a very strong and clear message as to what Knowledge Management and collaboration is all about. It is not about writing long essays or books or updating websites with some large content or when creating lengthy weblog posts that would take ages for people to digest. It is more about spending some time on those idle moments, where nothing seems to be happening while we wait for things to take place, when we can take the most advantage for knowledge sharing and collaboration. That is when the inspiration and the motivation would come up to share some knowledge with your colleagues. The key thing from Harnessing your interstitial time is that it brings forward a message that anybody can do apply successfully Knowledge Management principles about sharing knowledge and collaborating with others who may need to know or be aware of what is happening.

And as you can read from the weblog post there are tons of ideas for short activities to get engage with in order to share knowledge with others. Sometimes a simple phone call, or an e-mail, or an IM / VoIP conversation with others would be more than enough to get the ball rolling and start sharing for the benefit of the group. And this is what 43folders has put together very nicely. A good listing of impressive tips with which nobody can say there is any longer an excuse to share knowledge with your peers, since we are all having lots of idle moments during the course of the day, and yet we do not get anything done during those time lapses. Well, maybe we should do something now, maybe we should start taking much more seriously Knowledge Management and encourage folks that the benefits of knowledge sharing and collaboration are much more rewarding than working in your own silo without looking any further. And on top of that you can do it in a much shorter time than you thought. Or not ? Thus are you harnessing your interstitial time well enough or are you thinking that those idle moments are still unproductive and you are just as fine with that? I guess you decide but let me tell you how easy it is just to make things work and share that knowledge with others. You just need to dive in for a few minutes and off you go. You have done your work and have made it work for others. Knowledge Management in its purest form: sharing knowledge whenever you want with whoever you want in the time span you decide it is best for everyone and without having any restrictions on the nature of the amount of time spent.

I tell you, folks, if you are looking for an inspirational weblog post to help improve the productivity of your colleagues by helping them share their knowledge and expertise I doubt there is a simpler, yet so much more effective, way of achieving this than 43Folder’s Harnessing your interstitial time.

5 Minute Yoga Stretches for the Office

(Migrated weblog post from LSR)

A couple of months back I created a weblog post related to something which, even today, I still consider a key item that we need to keep in our minds specially when we may be working on a computer for an extensive amount of hours per day: How To Sit at a Computer. That is right, how to sit correctly at a computer was a post I created to share some tricks and techniques on what folks could do to try to avoid RSI, one of those issues that we all face at some point or another.

And if back then, I shared a couple of interesting web links on the subject I would like to point you today towards another web link that I have found myself very useful from the perspective that it has allowed me to take much more control about the time I am spending in front of the computer by doing a number of Yoga stretches that help me ease out whatever signals there may be related to RSI. The web link itself is called 5 Minute Yoga Stretches for the Office and you can find it here.

It provides you with a unique opportunity to execute a number of very useful Yoga stretches without you having to leave the computer, so that you do not have that sensation that you are wasting your time doing something else. There are a number of twists, bends, some more information about eyestrain and wrist and arm tension. And although at the very beginning it may seem to be a little complicated as you actually get along to practice those stretches you eventually feel quite comfortable and after no time you end up doing them just as if they were part of your daily work routine. Very very helpful indeed. And remember that in cases like RSI the main person who should take the first steps to prevent further issues with it is yourselves, so the sooner you get down to business with those stretches the sooner your body would be grateful for it. So next time you start feeling the itch get ready to do some stretches.

Killer Buzz Flocks to New Browser

(Migrated weblog post from LSR)

I have meant to create a weblog post back when I was first exposed to a Wired news article, but I thought I would delay it a little bit hoping that it would be in perfect timing with the release of a new web browser. But it looks like it is going to take some more time before that may happen so I thought I would go ahead, create the weblog post, give you a little taste of what is coming and then wait for an upcoming launch of, what some have already mentioned, the best web browsing experience there is out there on the Internet, specially for those power web browser end-users who are very much into Web 2.0.

The news article itself from Wired is titled Killer Buzz Flocks to New Browser and it basically comes to talk about Flock, an open source browser that supposingly will go live in early October. I am certainly looking forward to trying out this new web browser, more than anything else because of all the hype there is going on about it from the perspective where it has been flagged as a “social browser”, something that you obviously don’t get to see every day.

I will be looking forward for its integration features with other social computing offerings like Flickr, Technorati and del.icio.us since we may be actually witnessing a new much more creative and interactive way of browsing around the Internet, and, what is most important, we may end up using a browser that will help people connect with one another much easier in such a way that group collaboration on the Web will take another meaning. Lots of great things have been said about it, about how it will be helping out give web browsing a lot more collaborative power than what we are used to with the current offerings. But so far the only thing we can do is to head over to the Flock and sign up with your e-mail address and hope you will be one of the lucky winners who may have the opportunity to try it out first before everybody else does.

Either way, if it does bring together all of the different social computing features that have been mentioned all over the place I think we are off to some some really good fun on the Web by allowing us, end-users, to collaborate and share information with others in a much more powerful way than ever before, even than when working with traditional desktop software. If you want to go for a good read on what is behind Flock just check out this weblog post at Techcrunch: Flock – Social Browsing is Cool. I bet you can’t wait for it long enough, can you ? Neither can I.