Mathemagenic

While figuring out how to summarise 30+ pages chapter on my blogging practices for a talk I’m giving tomorrow I realised that it could make sense to share some of the bits from it here. This one is on the reasons to use weblog to keep information bits, using the list of factors for choosing a strategy for Keeping found things found on the web.

Portability / Number of access points. Using weblog for organising my thinking resources fits well my preferences for web-based applications in general, since I use multiple computers and I’m very likely to be online while working. In this respect server-based weblog provides much better alternative for organising my ideas than any desktop application, since I can access when I’m online regardless of the location.

Preservation of information in its current state / Currency of information. To a degree weblog allows both at the same time. I usually quote most relevant bits of external resources, so those quotes are preserved in their current state. The quotes are accompanied with a link to the original (if online), so an updated version is easily accessible. If the original disappears or is moved, I could use the quote for find it (usually it’s an updated location easily found with any search engine, otherwise I use Internet Archive Wayback machine).

Context (remembering why it was saved) / Reminding. Most of my weblog posts contain a commentary that provides a context for a specific thought or reference; I also use multiple strategies to establish connections between different posts. That context is enough to recall why certain weblog post is there and to remember to use it at a later stage (although not as effective as to-do lists to serve as a reminder of an urgent task).

Ease of integration into existing structures. From one side, my weblog is a stand-alone tool that requires its own organisation and archiving. From another, it is essentially a set of webpages connected by links, with permalinks, metadata and underlying standards. It is an integral part of my online presence (as evident by searching for my name in any search engine) and references to it could be easily included in a variety of other documents or systems.

Communication and information sharing. Sharing information via a weblog is not a specific activity, but a by-product of writing. In most cases it’s an advantage; however it limits potential uses of blogging when access to some of the weblog posts have to be restricted. Weblog is not good for a goal-driven communication to a known few people, but it is a perfect instrument for non-intrusive sharing of ideas in cases where potential audience is not well defined.

Ease of maintenance. In my case most maintenance problems are technology-related and they are the result of choosing weblog platform that provides high degree of freedom and flexibility.

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Over time my PhD research has gone through several shifts of focus: since the end of 2003 my research questions oscillate in a space that involves knowledge work and blogging (e.g. PhD outlines in December 2003 and Audgust 2006). In all that process it looks like I moved away from my work on personal knowledge management, which is not truly so.

In my approach of understanding PKM using weblogs as a lens (starting here, more refined), I was torn apart between focusing on the PKM side of knowledge work and focusing on weblog uses by knowledge workers (that in turn should be shading light on PKM). At a certain moment I had to make choices: I decided to reduce the complexity by focusing on blogging practices of knowledge workers*. So, my work on PKM became a way to inform and structure my research on blogging, rather than a research focus.

In my earlier work I tried to define PKM as an alternative to the task-based view on knowledge work and to focus on a knowledge worker perspective as an alternative to an organisational perspective on KM. Since my interest have always been in the middlespace between personal and organisational issues around knowledge work and PKM model (version 1, version 2) was pretty much at the personal level, I ended up struggling with figuring out how to integrate the organisational dimension in my research (one attempt is here - blogging practices in three contexts).

However, recently I found myself coming back to my PKM models as a way to position the choices of case-studies for my dissertation. In that process I’ve got some ideas of how to address the issues that didn’t make me happy.

Two posts to come :)

*That was after coming back from Microsoft and also had a “pragmatic” side to it - I had lots of good insides on the blogging practices of knowledge workers, but also figured out the complexity of generalising those to PKM/knowledge work in general.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/08/02.html#a1927; comments are here.

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A thought from last weekend discussion on differences in personal feelings and strategies in respect to a group pressure (e.g. how do you feel when a group of your close friends decides to do something you don’t really enjoy) - personal preferences like this one seem to find a way into work things that are not related at the first sight.

I usually find emotionally difficult to “have good time with nice people regardless of the activity” and need a strong personal reason (”enjoying the activity while having fun with others”) to join in. For me integrating in another culture is not easy - not figuring out how it works, but complying to the underlying rules just because it makes life more socially rewarding. I’m not fast in going for a concensus in a work-related discussions and if I do it’s usually based on goal-related argumentation rather than grounded in keeping emotional peace in the group. People say I’m stubborn - I prefer to rephrase it into “I don’t have a problem of giving up my position, I only need some good arguments to be convinced” :)

Giving all that it should not be surpising that that lots of my research is focused on individual perspective on things at work, as well as on negotiations and interplays between individuals and bigger social forces (groups, communities, organisations) around that. I realised this at the end of the discussion of differences between me and Robert in respect to handing social pressure, when he remarked that our choices for PhD topics say a lot about preferences for it (his PhD is on designing technology to support groups ;)

I wonder if someone did a study on how people choose and shape their PhD topic - given my personal experiences it’s hard to believe that this is done based on purely scientific ground of identifying gaps in existing theories… In this respect reflecting on my own choices for doing PhD (topics, methodology, ethics, etc.) has been a great source for understanding myself. May be it’s a main reason to do a PhD after all :)))

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/08/30.html#a1824; comments are here.

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The second of my recently found GTD tools is SlimTimer (via Alex Halavais).

Purpose: web-based time-tracking and reporting

• add and edit tasks, task tagging
• easy timer to start/stop a task
• all kinds of reports on time spent
• sharing reporting (also per tag) with others

Why I like it

Everyone says that proper time management starts from tracking how you spend your time. The way it worked for me was on paper (I’m so paper based with those things :) - just list with tasks list, start and finish time and a column for main projects/types of tasks I was interested to record. Was useful, but didn’t last long since calculating overall time spent on things was quite a but of manual work.

Now I have something easy - one click and it’s starts ticking, another one and it stops. Easy to use even when I switch every few minutes. Also good to start before going to a meeting. It took a bit of installation (I use Windows tray option).

Caveats: It works for me since I don’t have many offline tasks. Those I have are bigger chunks of time easily attributed to a project and recorded as an appointment in my schedule. I deal with those in several ways: manually add them to have an accurate estimate in the report or just ignore them (since I’m more interested where the time in front of the computer goes and I look at the records in my schedule anyway for official work time reporting).

Tricks - don’t have many yet, except of one:

• If you are as stupid as me and can’t figure how to start the timing a task - click on the name of the task itself and not on the checkmark on the left (that one completes the task).

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/08/02.html#a1812; comments are here.

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Recently I discovered a couple of tools that made my “organising myself” work much easier. Thought it could be worth sharing.

The first one is Remember the milk, recommended by Aldo

Purpose: web-based task management

• add and check-out tasks
• organise tasks in groups (called lists)
• share tasks with other users
• set-up and retrieve by: list, priority, due date, tag and lots of other parameters
• set-up notifications (by email, IM, SMS), calendar integration, RSS

Why I like it:

I was never able to get along with a computer-based task management system. What actually worked for me was a list of paper on my desk where I’d add tasks big and small as soon as they come to my mind, put colored dots for those most important, cross as done and rewrite the list as soon as I needed space or too much was crossed. It wasn’t the optimal solution: too much work to rewrite the whole thing and no easy way to remember those personal tasks in the list that I actually had to do at home. When going away from my desk for work I’d write a little post-it with “active to-dos” and stick it to the folder with “active paper” that I usually have with me anyway.

Now I have one place with all my tasks (including: “select and put online wedding photos” ;) that I can access when I need, update easily and event print. I don’t use any of the notifications, instead I look in the list at the beginning of the day, at the moments when I’m deciding what to do next and before I go shopping.

Caveats - it fits my lifestyle: no paper agenda (because I’ll forget it anyway), online access at home and at work, not that much time offline and being happy with not having access to my task list 100% time.

There are a few tricks that make life easier (and pretty annoying without them)

• Keyboard shortcuts: the most important is ‘m’ for switching on/off editing multiple tasks, learning others helps as well (it says Learn keyboard shortcuts and it actually important since life is miserable with lots of clicking if you are not using them)
• Breaking tasks into separate lists (e.g. ‘personal’ and ‘work’ or more detailed) helps to keep a group-level overview, but then you miss higher-level picture. I was missing two lists: all active tasks and all “due today or overdue” tasks. Both could be created by smart lists:

• all active tasks - search for status:incomplete and then save the search results
• all “to do now” tasks - dueBefore:today OR due:today and then save the search results (thanks to Emily from the project team for suggesting in email)

Things that don’t make me happy

• occasional glitches (forgivable: free beta product that works most of the times)
• Dutch interface unless I login and it retrieves my priorities for English (I always find it annoying when whatever web-site assumes my language given my IP-address and doesn’t have an option to change it easily)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/08/01.html#a1811; comments are here.

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Another turn on ‘E-mail is where knowledge goes to die’ and that blogs could solve the problem, but it’s not easy to ’sell’ to managers (Andy, thanks for the pointer). And a very good comment by Tony Karrer:

I’ve seen a few other places that advocate this, BUT, how do you address the fact that email is relatively more of a push technology. In other words, in today’s corporate world, someone is more likely to read an email than an update to a web page.

Given my own blogging experiences I believe that this issue has to be taken seriously. There are a couple of reasons for that:

First, email serves many functions. Next to being a tool for communication, it could work reminder for to-dos, organiser of work and even turn into habitat at work (for those who want more - look at email management research and studies that touch email as part of personal information management research).

Suggesting that (part of) email communication should be replaced by blogging without taking into account those functions is likely to break existing personal information management practices of people. This could result in decreased personal productivity next to increased organisational productivity with questionable net gain.

Second, before we discuss increased organisational productivity as a result of (part of) personal email archives available on intranet we need to make sure that those bits will actually be found and used by others. And this is not that easy…

With email you have to deal with mainly with your own inbox. It’s already much of an email overload, since next to those really important ‘to do’ emails you are likely to have ‘FYI’ emails on things that might be interesting, ‘corporate spam’ (saw the term recently, don’t remember where) that you may not need at all, but someone in a company thinks that you need, personal emails and lots of other things. Or, using distinctions in my previous post, it includes things that don’t fit that are often difficult to process.

Now just imagine that next to your own mailbox you have access to mailboxes of others. The amount of things that don’t fit increases dramatically. The good side of it that it’s a source of unexpected insights, it’s searchable, it’s archived company-wide forever. The bad thing is that we are not equipped to deal with it.

Now to my personal example. When I started blogging I loved it. Reading others brought all those unexpected insights and relationships that improved my work dramatically. However, it also brought heavy information overload that I wasn’t prepared to deal with. Having many (more than I could ever imagine) bits of potentially useful insights with no immediate way to process them made me feeling stressed and lost. I am a bit better now, but it’s still not working well and I still envy Ton who not only wrote about need for new information processing strategies, but also figured out how those could work for himself (check his posts on filtering, tools and routines).

So, I’d suggest that before evangelising blogs as an alternative to email we should figure out how people in a company are going to process increased amounts of available and potentially useful information when it comes out from hidden email archives. Otherwise we risk of moving a big chunk of information from email that at least read to a company-wide intranet that many people learnt to ignore (unless that important document is announced by an email from CEO).

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/07/24.html#a1805; comments are here.

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Spent some time digging out MSFT white paper referred in one of internal presentation - funny enough I had to use a combination of intranet search and Google to find out the exact title, if it was public (yes) and exact location… I guess Microsoft could do a better job of publicising resources that suppose to influence customers’ mindset :)))

Anyway, the while paper - Digital Work Style: The New World of Work (.doc; 129KB) (see also: more explanations and related resources).

[The reason I wanted to blog it: I think it outlines trends and scenarios of knowedge work (they talk about information work) in a pretty good way.

I have to run now, but may come back later on today to added bullet-point summary for the paper.]

On a side note - Microsoft Office people are doing some interesting things (as I could judge from the things I’ve seen on the walls in the bulding where some of them sit :), unfortunately they have many reasons not to blog about it…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/08/26.html#a1644; comments are here.

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I used to blog papers I read, but over last few months it wasn’t that much. Here is one from yesterday:

Neustaedter, C., Brush, A., and Smith, M., (2005) “Beyond “From” and “Received”: Exploring the Dynamics of Email Triage.” CHI 2005 Short Papers.

Abstract. Email triage is the process of going through unhandled email and deciding what to do with it. Email triage can quickly become a serious problem for users as the amount of unhandled email grows. We investigate the problem of email triage by presenting interview and survey results that articulate user needs for email triage. The results suggest the need for email user interfaces to provide additional socially salient information in order to bring important emails to the forefront.

Of course I didn’t know the word triage and I was surpised that to find out that it is “a process for sorting injured people into groups based on their need for or likely benefit from immediate medical treatment” (more details at Wikipedia).

The paper is 4 pages, so you can get an impression of the main findings byt yourself, but there are a couple of things that I find pretty much corresponding with the insights from interviews on information overload we did at work.

What we found most interesting was that the interview participants using the multi-pass strategy would routinely use a first pass to handle emails they consider to be not important or junk. This pass would involve finding emails they could quickly delete or get rid of.

We didn’t look at email handling directly, but it comes heavily while talking about information overload. When talking about their email handling strategies several people noted the same. I wonder why. I guess next to the fact that getting rid of not important stuff is easy, but probably also because endorphin release upon completing the task :)

But what I’ve also heard from our participants that sometimes cleaning and organising emails takes so much time that, although properly sorted, important emails do not get much time to be read or acted upon…

The second thing from the paper is one of the recurrent themes, not only in this interview round, but also in other studies on whatever technology for communication and knowledge sharing.

Regardless of the user type, we found that most people felt their strategy was pretty good, but realized there were likely other, more efficient strategies.

What I find out often that technology training people get are often stops at a level of functionality (”if you want to send email click this button”), while usually there is not much discussion about productivity, your own and others (”think before emailing - may be a colleague is next door and would actually enjoy a coffee break instead of one more message in a mailbox”). We are often taught how to use tools for what they designed, but not how to use them to make our life easier and more fun.

Anyway, what would be practical implications of it? Apart of reshaping existing technology trainings I’m thinking of ways to share personal effectiveness tricks and establishing shared communication practices that make life of everyone easier. Those probably could help, but then there are questions about starting the process:

• moving out of your own comfort zone (”if it doesn’t break don’t touch it”)
• finding ways to talk to others about practices which are usually hidden in our personal interactions with tools
• getting convinced that there is a value in comparing personal effectiveness tricks (this is a big issue - it’s easy to say “do it like me”, but most likely answer is “it doesn’t fit because I organise my work differently”) and figuring out how to pick up something that could be useful in spite of differences

Of course, you can design better tools, but I’m not convinced it would help - many times it’s not about having a good instrument, but about knowing how to use it in a good way :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/06/23.html#a1593; comments are here.

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In the core of my PhD research approach is active participation, which brings me somewhere between ethnography and action research. I’m still working on positioning what I do between existing approaches, but some elements and connections are getting clear.

I study my own people. This is something that would fall into auto-ethnography category.

The shared similarities among auto-ethnographies are that, in each case, the researchers posses the qualities of other permanent self-identification with a group and full internal membership, as recognised by themselves and the people of whom they are part. [Hayano, 1979:100]

I study my own people by being engaged in something that I found called thick participation, which

implies apprenticeship and practice, natural conversation and observation, lived experience and sensuous research. [Spittler, 2001: 1]

My study is heavily informed by reflecting on my personal experiences of “participating in the life of my tribe”, so calling is reflexive ethnography is another option.

In reflexive ethnographies, the researcher’s personal experience becomes important primarily in how it illuminates the culture under study. Reflexive ethnographies range along a continuum from starting research from one’s own experience to ethnographies where the researcher’s experience is actually studies along with other participants, to confessional tales where the researcher’s experience of doing the study become the focus of investigation. [Ellis&Bochner, 2000:740]

One day I’ll explain properly why those elements are important, but the short answer is that the focus of my PhD calls for it.

My PhD is focused on understanding personal knowledge management through studying blogging practices. For both personal knowledge management and blogging practices there are a few of things I consider important:

• “actor” perspective and holistic view – I’m interested how different practices are connected at individual level
• invisible and implicit nature – some elements of practices I’m studying either invisible for an outsider or, even worse, implicit

In this respect my PhD is about articulating the invisible from personal perspective, so personal engagement and reflection make a good starting point. Living between others who share similar practices and sometimes even share my research questions provides a space for learning from observing their practices, reflecting on differences, testing emergent interpretations and feedback on my results.

[To be continued. I also promise to be a good girl and add proper references]

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/04/13.html#a1547; comments are here.

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Bill Ives puts it nicely:

From an individual perspective blogs offer:

Creation – publishing content within a personal voice
Collection – managing personal content in a searchable archive
Context – applying commentary to content you manage

From a networking perspective blogs provide:

Connection – discovering others with your interests
Conversation – engaging in dialogs on an organizational or global basis
Community – building networks around shared themes
Collaboration – finding new business partners

I’d add a big picture (corporate or community perspective): aggregation, emergence of unexpected, tapping into invisible…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/03/11.html#a1519; comments are here.

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