Mathemagenic

Tom Erickson in 1995 essay Work and Spirit:

It's popular to talk about the boundaries between work and leisure getting increasingly fuzzy. But for me, until I began working at home, it felt more like work was seeping into my leisure and home time, and that the non-work aspects of life were shrinking. Technology has made it easy for work-life to follow us home, but not as easy for home-life to follow us to work. Only now that I work at home, do I find that there is a better feeling of balance between the two.

This beautifully written essay (wonder is it Tom's research or writing that is turning me into his fan ;) gets me thinking again on turning work into life - may be bringing Home or "personal" is one of the missing ingridients?

Some time back I wrote in personal KM Q&A about my views on future developments in PKM (bold is added now):

I believe at this moment we are at "raising awareness" stage, trying to understand why personal perspective in KM is important. I think we should expect development of better tools and efforts to integrate existing ones. I guess personal KM coaching and training will be an interesting development. It may not have this name, but a believe that it will be a growing demand for developing awareness of one's expertise and marketing it, personal networking and personal information management skills and may be also skills of crafting one's workplace to fit personal preferences.

May be this last point is more important than I thought: knowing what is "life" for you and making sure that it has place at your workplace.

I guess it's the whole art of choosing and shaping your work to make you happy... I'm still learning it, but this is my main working rule so far:

take risk to try it - find what and how you like doing and try fitting it your existing job (aka hand-made magic)

As an example - me, a year ago, on changed PhD focus:

I didn't think that I would seriousely look at weblogs in my PhD research. Well, you never know: Life has more imagination than we carry in our dreams.

Having some victories makes ongoing battles easier :)

Voida, A., Mynatt, E.D., Erickson, T., & Kellogg, W.A. (2004). Interviewing over instant messaging. In extended abstracts of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2004). Vienna, Austria, April 24-29. New York: ACM Press, pp. 1344-1347. (If you don't have full-text access to ACM, you can get .pdf here or here)

Abstract. Interviews are a cornerstone of human-computer interaction research. As a research method, they can both be deeply valuable and distinctly challenging. Pragmatic challenges of interviews include the travel that may be required to meet face-to-face with a respondent or the time necessary to transcribe the exchange. As a tool for conducting interviews, instant messaging presents some compelling potential benefits to mitigate challenges such as these. And yet, over the medium of instant messaging, the genre of the interview takes on a different character. Drawing from our experiences conducting interviews over instant messaging, we reflect on the implications of using this new medium for conducting interviews.

It's just 4 pages, so I'm too lazy to summarise...

I'm really thinking of doing IM interviews for my PhD research. Any experiences I should take into account?