On Sundays I love having breakfast with my husband, (something we never do during the week) before heading off with him for a day of fun typically at the beach. By 5:00 p.m. we are back at home and I begin to work either in my inspiration book or on my computer. I get this practice from my father. A journalist all his life, my dad used the hours between our church going and the serving of Sunday lunch, to write columns, get quotes, calls leads for a story and plan for the week ahead.
My friend Kathleen, a baker, is just the same when it comes to making meaningful use of her time. Take the lazy month of August. Typically business is slower and the month is punctuated with no rush mornings, slower sales and loads of downtime. But even in August Kathleen, who has two children off from school, gives herself a challenge. This 'summer' she intends to complete her bakery's new website and revisit her manuscript about Caribbean breads.
What do you do with the time on your hands?
More and more, we're finding it easy to get engaged with activities that feel like work, but aren't. And the reason may be that we are attached to too many gadgets; our screens are no longer in solely in our living rooms, they've become smaller and they're in our pockets, on our desk and in our hands. We are tethered to the instant flow of information and it allows us to confuse busyness with creating and doing work that counts in the long run.
We may get a rush playing Farmville, talking constantly to people we don't know, giving our location updates and visiting 40 websites a day but I think if we stepped back for a moment we have to honestly understand when we go from receiving information that nourishes, to getting engrossed in the kind of information that distracts.
At least that was what was going through my head last evening when one of my best friends told me that she hadn't had time to read a book I loaned her on the topic of self discovery and finding a career path that was fulfilling. "Too many distractions. Too many other things to do," she said. Yet when I mentioned the hours she spent on facebook she blushed sheepishly. "Imagine" I told her, "spending two of those hours soaking in knowledge that could impact your life.
Author Seth Goodin makes the point that one reason for the lack of focus is that we're often using precisely the same device to do our work as we are to distract ourselves from our work. He advises that we get two devices. "Only use your computer for work. Real work. The work of making something and the second device, perhaps an iPad, and use it for games, web commenting, online shopping, networking... anything that doesn't directly create valued output," he writes
For some that may be an expensive proposition and I think the better way may be to reprogramme our mind to just stop – to turn off the BlackBerry and the iPhone, to check e-mail two or three times a day rather than every three minutes, to spend a few hours reading a novel or immersed in a hobby or having a real conversation. The end result is we will find ourselves with more time on our hands. Time we could spend giving our brain the opportunity to relax, think, recharge and maybe if we are lucky like Kathleen, to create something of value that matters, in the long run, to others.
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Digital tablets are now a major game changer in publishing. And I know this after obsessing over my husband's new shiny e-reader which arrived 2 weeks ago. One of the things I am impressed by (yes, I think I am getting more view time than him) is how much it has revolutionised my own reading. Among my friends I am known as a magazine freak ,from fitness to fashion and news, my living room is littered with 12 different kinds of subscriptions, all dog eared and well used. So the new e-reader was a kind of eye opener for me.
My favourite magazines seemed to be more up-to-the-minute, more interactive, and more eye-catching. Holding the tablet and getting such rich colour and interactivity was really an engaging way to look at my favourite publication but it also got me thinking about what it means for the future of publishing.
For the past 5 years there has been a lot of debate about the future of print and the economic crisis in 2008 hit the magazine world right where it hurt the most, in the pocket with falling subscriptions and very low advertising spend. Then In came the Ipad and the more than 50 versions of consumer tablets and now the masters of ink and glossy photo see in them a way to rejuvenate an entire industry.
Is such hope misplaced? Well not if you read the statistics.
100 million tablets and e-readers will be hands of US residents by 2013 according to The Monitor. Last year, digital content brought in about 10 percent of magazine revenues, according to mediaIDEAS, a global research and advisory firm with offices in New York and London. By 2020, digital content will account for 58 percent.
What is interesting is how much the quantity of reading is changing. Digital Tablets it seems can boost reading. Users of e-readers are 11 percent more likely than the average adult to have read a print or online newspaper and of 1,600 iPad owners interviewed by the Reynolds Journalism Institute last October, 79 percent reported using it at least 30 minutes a day to read news. Only slightly more than half spent that much time getting news from the TV or a PC.
On my husband's Ipad, I find myself actually reading and not skimming and it is a great joy to see how some magazines are actually experimenting with digital content specially formatted for the tablets. In Elle a model actually appear as a living cover and walk across the screen before settling in the middle of the screen in a n editorial pose. In National Geographic, its digital edition not only ran an article on aardvarks but also included video of the photographers working to get the shots on camera.
Social Reading
Digital tablets are also best suited for how social our reading has become. We read. We share. Reading is no longer a solo endeavour. Articles are linked on Twitter. Quotes lifted from magazines are posted as status updates. We share links as content. Adding a social layer to the content experience means staying relevant in an over-populated space. It may be a QR code, a Facebook promotion or a section featuring the up-and-coming blogs. Incorporating bloggers can also help magazine broaden its audience and provide new forms of engagement.
As the digital space becomes a second home for print publications, there are some major considerations. Remaining fresh is going to be a major time constraint, writers may need to learn a new set of skills to re-purpose content across multiple platforms and unless publishers can come up with a business model that speaks to the convergence of the digital and print world, print sales may continue to decline because as of last week as I downloaded the latest version of Vogue, I wondered which print subscriptions I'd definitely not be renewing .
Hope is an essential ingredient when growing your business, so too is patience. They will get you through the inevitable dips and bumps in the journey and provide you with the bits of optimism necessary to persevere.
Patience though does not come without the work. The long hours, the worry, the working weekends negate any word-associated thinking that patience is about any waiting game. Instead it is all about action, doing, thinking re-looking, revising, pressing forward, stepping back, rethinking, doing.
11 years in Grenada I met a CEO who epitomized all of this. Joel Webbe, CEO of W&W Electronics Ltd., a high technology production company, had just Entrepreneur of the Year award when I went to Grenada to interview him. What amazed me about his story was his resilience. After painstakingly building a profitable business in 1989, it was destroyed by a volcano in Monsterrat. A year later he moved production to Grenada and watched his factory crumble to the floor during two hurricanes. Through each dip, and on the verge of bankruptcy Webbe relied on faith, family, day-in and day-out patient work to get through and rebuild.
Likewise Starbucks didn't become Starbucks without the work and mistakes necessary to become a global business. At first they plugged along with a few stores. "They raised bits of money here and there, flirted with disaster, added one store and then another, tweaked and measured and improved and repeated. Day by day, they dripped their way to success."
Writer JK Rowlings sat in coffee shops for days on end, was virtually homeless and a single mother while she worked on her book. What do the three have in common. There was no magic lottery ticket for Webbe, no silver bullet for Starbucks, no quick fix for Rowlings. Just time and a painstaking, patient kind of work.
But what of hope?
It's an ingredient I think that is even more difficult than patience to get a hold of, because hope is less tangible. When a fledgling entrepreneur rushes over to a financier who just appeared on a panel and goes into a speech about his business with the 'hope; that she will be impressed enough to write a $3 million dollar cheque, that hope is misplaced. Hope never involves shortcuts. And while it can be magical, it also suggests a precision like focus on what's important to succeed. It suggests that your work should be grounded in passion and be worthy of your energy. It dictates that what you deliver day in and out ought to be remarkable. It necessitates that you delight your audience. It demands that you work your way up. In the end what it really means is that you should follow the longer, more deliberate path and walk it one step at a time.
Every step, at the end, becomes a remarkable journey in hope.
From Steve Crescenzo's article "Ready for Change" in IABC's Communication World
"Social media and new media demand talent. They demand personality. They demand human beings. And where are you going to find those things? In the accounting office? Where engineers hang out? Over in HR? Of course not. Communicators have those qualities in spades, and we're starting to show them off."
Just last evening, Nicole Duke-Westfield, former business editor at the Trinidad Guardian (now Guardian Media Limited), and I spent a careful twenty minutes pondering the state of new media in the Caribbean. Why was it that few editors were running on the social media track? Why weren't newsrooms engaging more on Twitter? Why weren't journalists repurposing content for video and podcasts?
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Every once in a while, someone will stop me in a mall and say: “Your face looks familiar, are you that person who used to work on TV.” It’s not a silly question. I did once, a long time ago, but if I am in a hurry I’ll look that person directly in the eye and say: “Maybe you have me mistaken for someone else.”
...They are not mine, they’re Seth’s but the more meetings I go to (4 yesterday) the more I believe that something has to change. I’ll start with these.
...They are not mine, they’re Seth’s but the more meetings I go to (4 yesterday) the more I believe that something has to change. I’ll start with these.
...Making it's debut yesterday was the new search engine qwiki.com. You're going to like its look and feel.
“When we debate,” said Prakash Ramadhar in Parliament last week, “the only winners must be the people of Trinidad and Tobago.”
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