Mathemagenic

There is an interesting discussion on the Knowledge worker paradox story I posted to the Knowledge Board some time back. I would not repost all interesting comments here, just a piece from my own thinking:

Recently I started to think about knowledge worker productivity as about personal effectiveness in a knowledge-intensive environment. I'm interested to see how knowledge workers do their work and what could be improved.

For example, being involved into conversations in different communities or professional networks is an important part of learning and coming up with new ideas, but our time and capability to establish and manage relations are limited. How do I make choices selecting groups to join? How do I remember all different conversations and their contexts? Some people do it naturally (I guess I'm not the only one wondering how Denham manages all his online activities :), others have to struggle... I could think about many other knowledge-work-related activities that could be improved: keeping track of someone's readings, brainstorming ideas, effective sharing. Next to it there are different technologies that can make those tasks easier or more difficult. And other "simple" issues like time management.

There is something I don't like about blogging: it makes all the loose ends visible.

I usually have more ideas than time to implement them. Blogging is perfect for it: you've got a minute, you post an idea, a conversation develops, you follow it and think of writing a story to pull all the bits together and to reflect, but then next busy week comes and there is no time anymore and new ideas are getting written down. For me this was usual - coming up with more ideas than time to implement them. But blogging is changing it. Once ideas are written down I have a visible trace of things I forgot to do and it pains to look back and to see them waiting for me to come back and to work them out.

Before I was happy to look back and to see how much have been done. Blogging makes it different: I look back and I see things that could have been done if I would have more time or more focus. This is something that takes me out of the comfort zone and pushes to do more...

A few weeks back Richard MacManus wrote starting his adventure of Writing a novel in 30 days:

btw, one reason why I'm writing this novel is to explore themes - such as two-way communication - that seem to demand a bigger canvas than a weblog

I keep thinking about it. I guess this is something my weblog has done for me: revealing a need to pull all the loose ends into a bigger canvas, to connect bits of ideas and to work them out. This bigger canvas requires time and focus, it needs more than a few minutes in between to write to my weblog. It calls for recognising that is really important and for giving it enough energy to grow. Setting priorities, making choices and time management.

One of the most difficult things in learning time management is to become frustrated with loosing time enough for taking actions. Time management course (in Russian) I started a week ago suggests crossing days in a special calendar to get this feeling. I don't need it. I have my weblog showing me all the loose ends...