Wonderfully inspiring and a great source to describe how I am feeling about living “A World Without Email”; I wonder now whether folks would still see email as obscure, secret and private as it is and *do* something about it… Fingers crossed it will happen for them, because I can certainly state what a relief it’s been all along, since I got it started and you just gave it another direction I never thought it could take!

Whoahhh! Thanks much for that one, Jim! Please do remind me whenever we meet face to face to invite you for a drink or two!

All of those (Ambient Intimacy, Declarative Living or Narrating Your Work) are great spins on what I’m after. Which, in the end, is clarity.
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Ambient Intimacy – clarity of social relationships
Declarative Living – clarity of personal preference
Narrating Your Work – clarity of team direction
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Clarity is won through mastering your filters. Through taking information overload and making it your .. um … well, making it into knowledge. That knowledge is actionable.
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Teams who understand what’s going on can make immediate use of that understanding. They help their peers, they fix things in their processes that are broken, and they can work without worrying that they are doing the wrong thing.
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After that, work-life balance becomes a lot easier to solve, due to the release of a primary source of stress.

Talking about words… I just couldn’t help thinking about this quote you mentioned above: “We don’t know what we are doing, we don’t know how much we have to do, therefore we cannot limit it, filter it, or manage it”. That’s just so spot on!

That single sentence is an entire business case for those folks who are trying to promote Enterprise Micro-sharing/-blogging behind the corporate firewall. Absolutely fantastic and couldn’t have agreed more!

That’s one of the reasons why I am really enjoying your commentary about Lean, Agile and Social Media. Right on the money, once again! Whether you would want to call it Ambient Intimacy, Declarative Living or Narrating Your Work, it’s all about setting the right expectations for your own awareness and those around you. That’s what I like about micro-sharing itself; the fact that I can share those expectations to meet mine and those folks who care to follow, so eventually they can see whether I am ready to chime in, or not, and if not venture into when, more or less.

I think that “narrating your work” just fits in perfectly all right, like Alan’s example shows above. Yes, it may all sound like sharing some “silly” messages, but then again not having such “transparency” in sharing what you are doing automatically puts you on the list of those who-can-be-contacted-because-they-are-not-doing-anything; and you wouldn’t want to be in that group, unless you would want to go crazy!

Fabulous discussion, folks! Thoroughly enjoying it and surely a tipping point for me on proving the business value of micro-blogging/sharing, behind the firewall, and for that matter outside, too!

Thanks for the inspiration!

I love how this article and this conversation wrap neatly all my pet topics.

For years I’ve been evangelizing the links between Lean, Agile and Social Media. This conversation really makes my day.

Work – Life IMbalance comes, like any imbalance, from deficiencies. Most often, those deficiencies are of knowledge. We don’t know what we are doing, we don’t know how much we have to do, therefore we cannot limit it, filter it, or manage it.

We simply don’t understand what we do every day.

Social Media is our finely sharpened double-edged sword. It allows us to share tasks, to delegate and to collaborate like never before. But it also lets hundreds or thousands of people think that they can pop in unexpectedly and take up our time – maybe even give us tasks. (e.g. “Didn’t you see my facebook message yesterday? It’s been 12 hours and you haven’t responded!”)

We’re just finishing up a project with the UN entirely done in GoogleDocs – 19 collaborators world wide. It’s been so smooth as to defy description. It’s many-to-many product development done right.

Why?

Because our work load and our work balance has been well informed by the capabilities and capacities of the participants. No one expects any more of someone than that person can provide.

Work-life balance tends to suffer when we become (willingly or unwillingly) overcommitted. We do this because we have no mechanism to say “Dude! This thing here says I can say no!”

We have no authority to filter out new work. We have no clarity to make informed decisions or statement.

SocialText is going Kanban-happy because it is giving their very distributed team the ability to make informed decisions and feel comfortable about what’s being done – whether they are in Palo Alto or Vancouver.

But, and Alan can correct me on this, the Kanban at SocialText is extended and strengthened by the fact that the coders are using SocialText Signals at the same time for real-time communication and status updates.

What does this mean? That both the kanban and Signals are Social Media in the truest sense. They are informing people to make good decisions through real-time knowledge sharing. Without that – there can be no hope of work-life balance.

And yes, I am aware this was waayyyyyy to long of a comment.

Jim

Lots of food for thought with those excellent comments. I must confess, for the sake of transparency, that I used to feel that very same way up to a few years ago, but then again I learned through the hard way (Physical health at risk) that unless I did put a stop to it, no-one would; so I started to develop a trend of thought I needed to put a stop to it while I could.

And in doing so I eventually got it started by watching younger generations how they eventually get things going themselves amongst their peers and those around them; and over time I’m starting to grow very fond of the whole concept of “Social Contracts”, which I will probably develop some more in a follow up blog post.

But again many many thanks for those great comments and for adding further up into the conversation. Enjoyed it quite a bit knowing I’m not alone in some of these aspects

Now, I am not much of a paper or sticky notes boy, so I would probably need to find something online visual enough to grab that same spirit. Thinking that perhaps Connections Activities or a MindMap may be able to do the trick!

Worth while exploring for sure! Many thanks for dropping by and for engaging on such a great conversation! Worth a treat! And very much appreciated!

I also can identify strongly with the struggle, not just from history but from a semi-obsessive nature which makes it hard to fully trust my spam filter and hard to not feel I should look at each streaming comment from my connections. I think people like me need to find both tools and personal techniques to push back and regain our breathing space. For example, I’ve found nutshellmail (yes, I know, it’s email… ) as effective for creating a singular view of the multiple streams I want to see and am training myself more closely in the fine art of both quick skimming and forceful self-filtering (“It’s not that important” or “Unless this person gets onto (x) or (y) topic, just stop looking/don’t comment”). Let alone the aspects of work filtering.

You hit on the very important point that we put too much on ourselves out of some combination to please/ego gratification and fear of, as you well put it, hurting others (even though really a diplomatic “I’m too busy” is accepted by MOST people without a second thought, despite what goes on in our own heads about others’ perceptions).

I usually don’t like to post a “me, too” or “great!” comment as it doesn’t add much or any value, but I think this topic is so important I just wanted to lend support.

http://personalkanban.com/personal-kanban-101/

(Thanks, Alan!)