1. How (and Why) to Stop Multitasking - great article from Peter Bregman with some clear reasons why you should stop multi-tasking

A study showed that people distracted by incoming email and phone calls saw a 10-point fall in their IQs.

What’s the impact of a 10-point drop? The same as losing a night of sleep. More than twice the effect of smoking marijuana.

Doing several things at once is a trick we play on ourselves, thinking we’re getting more done. In reality, our productivity goes down by as much as 40%. We don’t actually multitask. We switch-task, rapidly shifting from one thing to another, interrupting ourselves unproductively, and losing time in the process.

Even better are the six things he learned the week he stopped trying to multi-task. I really need to do this

• First, it was delightful.
• Second, I made significant progress on challenging projects
• Third, my stress dropped dramatically.
• Fourth, I lost all patience for things I felt were not a good use of my time.
• Fifth, I had tremendous patience for things I felt were useful and enjoyable.
• Sixth, there was no downside.

2. RT @dmlcentral The Dalai Lama taps Internet and social media to engage in rare direct conversation w/ Chinese citizens – yep the Dalai Lama used Twitter.

3. Explaining racial differences in attitudes towards government use of social media – a brief article from the Pew Internet & American Life Project looking at racial differences in the use of social media.

4. 7 of My Favorite Timeless Tips from the Last 2500 Years

1. “As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.” – Andrew Carnegie
2. “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” – Carl Jung
3. “When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
4. “Be miserable. Or motivate yourself. Whatever has to be done, it’s always your choice.” – Wayne Dyer
5. “I claim to be a simple individual liable to err like any other fellow mortal. I own, however, that I have humility enough to confess my errors and to retrace my steps.” “It is unwise to be too sure of one’s own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.” – Gandhi
6. “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.” – Confucius
7. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – Mark Twain

5. RT @kongtemplation: great interview tips for librarians from @lynnemthomas – Tips for Librarian on the job market: 4 tips from the interview stage – a must read for anyone looking for a job

Secret #1: If you have landed an interview, the search committee already believes that you are capable of doing the job as they have described it and as you have indicated on your CV and Cover letter.
Secret #2: Interviews really answer the question “am I willing to work with this particular person every day for the next 10 years?” for good and for ill, on both sides.
Secret #3: The search committee is terrified that you won’t like them, either.
Secret #4: We’re all hoping for The One. The Perfect Gig. The You-Can-Pry-My-Awesome-Job-Out-of-My-Cold-Dead-Hands connection. But mostly? Especially early in our careers, we’re looking for a job that will work pretty well for us, and the search committee is looking for someone to fill their job without making them regret their decision a year or two down the line.

6. “Quitting Facebook is pointless; challenging them to do better is not“ (Another blog post on the topic by moi) via @zephoria

People will not leave Facebook en masse, even if a new site were to emerge. Realistically, if that were enough, they could go to MySpace or Orkut or Friendster or Tribe. But they won’t. And not just because those sites are no longer “cool.” They won’t because they’ve invested in Facebook and they’re still hoping that Facebook will get its act together. Changing services is costly, just like moving apartments or changing jobs or breaking up in general. The deeper the relationship, the harder it is to simply walk away. And the relationship that Facebook has built with many of its users is very very very deep. When transition costs are high, people work hard to change the situation so that they don’t have to transition. This is why people are complaining, this is why they are speaking up. And it’s really important that those in power listen to what it is that people are upset about. The worst thing that those in power can do is ignore what’s going on, waiting for it to go away.

7. RT @VenessaMiemis: smart piece on the meaning of privacy in an information age by @doriantaylor – a must read!

8. good convo about tweeting during presentations Twitter, tweeting and ethics via @woodsiegirl – a great discussion about using Twitter during presentations and meeting on the
Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CLIP) a UK-based professional organization for librarians.

9. 6 Reasons Why People Don’t Change, and What to Do About That – another great post from one of my favorite blogs. Here are the six reasons for how to overcome them read the full post

1. You don’t want to change.
2. You don’t feel courageous enough.
3. Your environment is holding you back.
4. You feel like giving up after one or three failures.
5. You don’t feel enough pain yet.
6. You don’t know how to practically make the change.

10 Why Controlling Bosses Have Unproductive Employees

…if your employees consider you a controlling person, even an unconscious thought of you can have a negative effect on their performance. If, for example, they were to happen to subliminally see, out of the corner of their eyes, your name flash for 60 milliseconds, you could expect them to start working less hard. Even if they didn’t intend to slack off.

11. yes! RT @uMCLE: Clay Shirky & Daniel Pink – a terrific conversation about TV, social networking & motivation – I’m a big fan of both of these gentleman and this is a great conversation

12. RT @zephoria: Pew Research confirms that youth care about their reputation. Report: Reputation Management and Social Media My comments:Pew Research confirms that youth care about their reputationSimilar Posts:

• Top Ten Links Week 23
• 10 Best Links from Twitter – Week in Review
• 10 Golden Rules of Social Media

Stayed up way too late reading the night before (I guess you never grow out of this!), so really need the coffee this morning!

First thing in the morning, prepare for and attend Branch Manager meeting at our Mildred L. Terry Branch. Its our newest one, we haven’t even had the grand opening ceremony yet.   This meeting took up most of the morning so go look at the pictures of the branch for something fun!

Grab something to eat on the way back my office

check email, check twitter

Teen Programs Meeting – I’m there to find out what they need/want from a Digital Branch, good information

Run downstairs between meetings to check on something for tomorrow, run into a staff member I want to be a member of Super Friends, talk with him about it, he’s in! Hurray!

Database Committee Meeting- we’re looking at what we have and what we need to add over the next year. It goes really well.

Grab peaches on the way home. I am really tired tonight and decide this should be my night away from the computer, I make myself take one once a week. Similar Posts:

• A day in the Life of a Librarian – Day 1
• A Day in the Life of a Digital Branch Manager
• Library Day in the Life – Wednesday, Day 5

Its seems like a day doesn’t go by without signing into my Twitter account to see a stream of tweets from someone going by with a #hashtag I don’t recognize. I’m not talking about a couple of tweets, I mean the full-on stream. I’m begging you, please stop!

I’m all for the idea of sending a Tweet when you hear something remarkable, moving, or innovative, but based on the number of Tweets I see flying by every other sentence is worth exclaiming over, somehow I doubt this.

What it really looks like is too many people are using Twitter as their personal note taking system.  Get a notebook, a netbook, or a pen and paper, whatever, just stop Tweeting!

If you’re Twittering:

• You’re not paying attention – mulitasking is a myth – you can not text as fast as you type, so whatever you are texting likely happened 30 seconds or more ago, meaning you are not paying attention to what is being said now.  Stop texting and pay attention, its what you’re there for. Even if you’re tweeting from a computer…
• You’re not contributing.  Yes, I know there are a few cases where some awesome back channel conversations* happen, and someone rushes off to write an article or a post about it, but most likely you’re not.
• You’re crying wolf – If you’re sending 20 tweets an hour, the really awesome super duper things got lost in the crowd of the bagillion others you sent you sent.  Pick and choose the really exceptional things to Tweet.
• Someone else is saying the SAME thing at the SAME time (most likely). Instead say something new, say something of value, pick the one or two really good pieces and Tweet those, it is much more useful for your followers.
• You’re loosing your followers, I don’t mean unfollowing, I mean they aren’t paying attention to you.  Sure one or two might love to here a play by play of whats happening right now, but the others don’t care.  They don’t care because they don’t want to spend the energy chasing down what the heck your hashtag means, they don’t care because they just popped on so see what their friends are up to and instead all they see is one person, you, filling up their screen.  They dont’ care, not because they don’t care what you’re tweeting about, they do, but because they don’t have the time and energy to focus on it right now.  They don’t care because they just don’t care.
• You’re making it hard for people to find the information later.  Sure you can search the hashtag and read through thousands of 140 character snippets of information, many of which say the same thing because everyone else was tweeting the conversation.
• You’re not blogging.  Yes I know some have declared blogs dead, but f I want real information about a session I missed I’d so much rather find a blog post.  Yes a blog post, with everything nicely typed out, not abbreviated in weird formats to fit in to 140 characters, not scattered across tens or hundreds of tweets.  I can bookmark one page, not 20.

If you find you absolutely must conference/meeting tweet prodigiously, take a page from my smart friend Maruice’s book and get a seperate account just for conferences.

*I’m not sure how I feel about these back channel conversations, everyone thinks they are so awesome, but arent’ they really just the equivalent of two people talking to each other in the back of the class?  It might go unnoticed in a large audience, but in a small group its just rude.

I’m not advocating never Twitter anything from a conference, meeting or pow-wow again, but show some discretion man, moderation in all things, even Twitter.Similar Posts:

• Do you Twitter at Work?
• Twitter: making the cut
• Emotional Customer Service for Library Professionals – Andrew Sanderbeck