I've just completed my third week of daily blog entries.
This blog is truly an experiment about how a blog impacts communications with my staff, my vendors, and my colleagues. Thus far, it's been a great learning experience. I've found that I can answer many questions in public forums by referring to postings I've made in my blog. I've posed several questions to the community via my blog and received many helpful responses. The big question will be - it is sustainable? I typically sleep 4 hours a night. Filtering the events of each day to develop a coherent blog theme, writing the blog and responding to comments takes about 30 minutes every day from my 4 hour sleeping hours.
Thus far, blogging has not reduced email, phone calls, or the number of daily controversial issues I must address.
If I can share my experiences, good and bad, with the entire community and catalyze good things to happen, I will feel completely satisfied with the time investment.
People who know me well know that I am not driven by fame or fortune, I just want to make a difference. My experience running a software company in my early 20's taught me that judging the value of life by a number in a bank balance, the type of car you drive, or the size of your house is not very satisfying.
I also crave learning. I welcome suggestions on how to become a better blogger. The world of blogging, wikis, Facebook, IM, and Second Life is a new experience for me and I hope to synthesize all of these new media pilots into a coherent, time efficient framework for communicating with all my stakeholders. Wish me luck!
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5 comments:
We can at least do that! Good luck! :)
And please don't abandon blogging! It is very interesting and I think in time it will prove valuable.
Dr. Halamka, your experiment with blogging prompts me to ask if you are a student of GTD? http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-10/ff_allen
If you want to experiment with a Microsoft centric GTD approach, you might want to tryout using a tablet PC, MS Outlook 2007, MS Business Contact Manager, MS Sharepoint portal and MS Onenote 2007. In my opinion, this software suite gives you a simple integrated approach to create to do flags, color code items and link records. It takes MS much iteration, but in my experience, they are finally getting GTD right.
Martin Streeter
Dunno if this has crossed your screen yet but it turns out there's a 4-star general in the Marine Corps ("Hoss" Cartright, yes, seriously, that's his handle), who's started blogging to reduce email and encourage cross-org communication. Now he has an advantage you don't: he can order people to participate but still...
I haven't done any digging on this so can't produce any facts and figures but apparently he's radically reduced his email and intra-org communication has improved.
Please don´t give up blogging. This has already become one of my must read daily blogs. Every other day would be fine :-) Keep up the good posts and try to get some more sleep.
"I've found that I can answer many questions in public forums by referring to postings I've made in my blog."
Yes, that's a /huge/ factor. The ability to answer a question with an URL will, over time, as the body of entries accumulates, provide you with huge leverage. I doubt that will translate into more sleep, but it will amplify your impact in many ways that will delight you.
What you are doing here is a wonderful example of something that has caught on mostly in the tech world but is becoming a best practice for professionals in all fields.
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