About Kathy Drasky

Recent Posts by Kathy Drasky

The One Thing at a Time Mantra by Tony Schwartz

A well-written piece on time management and the evils of multi-tasking has been making the rounds online and through various social network channels, in particular nearly every group you belong to on LinkedIn. It’s called “The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time” by Tony Schwartz of The Energy Project.

If you’ve read this far before clicking to something else, you’ve got a pretty good sense of what this is about. As Schwartz points out, technology has turned us into a bunch of hyper-wired, multi-tasking mutants who check email during meetings, eat meals over our laptops and text while driving (even though we know we shouldn’t) . The ability to be connected all the time has eliminated “stopping points, finish lines and boundaries…..Wherever we go, our work follows us, on our digital devices, ever insistent and intrusive.”

A popular fix for this, also making those weekly LinkedIn tips, is to do your work in 60- to 90-minute increments. The theory goes that we are only able to focus that long on any one project anyway, so to maximize production we should disconnect from all intrusions (both real, like someone at your door and imagined, like you have a more interesting email somewhere). I’ve personally been practicing this one and have seen some improvement not only in a sense of finishing something but also in less time spent with my chiropractor, who was preaching the “get up and move around” every hour theory long before Facebook came on the scene and became my preferred mid-morning and late-afternoon snack, eliminating even getting up and heading to the refrigerator for this long-time self-employed freelancer.

A quick glance at the most recent comments on the “The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time” piece shows a bit of a corporate backlash against some of Schwartz’s tips, like doing the most important thing on your list first thing in the morning and establishing regular, scheduled times to think more long term, creatively, or strategically. Apparently bosses get in the way of this. Another tip is to take real and regular vacations. Probably somewhat easier when that’s a paid perk, something I’ve experienced a total of once since 1989.

But whether we’re able to sit cross-legged on the home office floor and be one with our creative and strategic thinking or have to take a paid personal day every now and then to achieve — for now, the writing of pieces like the one by Tony Schwartz is on the wall. The hyper-connected workforce, both independent and otherwise drawing a paycheck must begin to establish the habit of doing one thing at a time in incremental blocks of time. Or else….

Source: Harvard Business Review: “The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time,” by Tony Schwartz.

Instagram, Facebook and Privacy: Rumblings on the Wall

Within minutes of Monday’s announcement that the world’s biggest social network (Facebook) acquired the world’s hippest (Instagram) for a cool $1 billion, the cries of more lost “privacy” commandeered online conversations. Twitter was the go-to guy to let your followers know what you thought of the deal.

This is not a post about existing privacy settings, changes that may (or may not) take place on Instagram now that it’s part of Facebook or Facebook’s well-known “tweaks” to its privacy settings when they think you’re not looking. This is a post about posting things online and common sense. If you think you’ve heard it all before, click here to read something more interesting. If not, here are three tips to help you understand (or, “get over”) this “invasion of privacy thing”.

1. The idea of social networks is sharing to keep connected online. You may not want to share everything you do with everybody you know. That’s why there are different types of social networks that provide different ways to share with different people identified as “friends”, “followers”, “circles”, etc. Obviously, for those who had recently left Facebook, or use it less, and have turned to Instagram for what they thought was a less invasive, more visual way to interact more anonymously, the Facebook buys Instagram deal is unsettling, but…. 

2. Don’t use any social network with privacy settings you can’t comfortably control to share photos, updates, thoughts or links. It’s simple, kids. Think. I know right now you want to post how much in love you are with your current girlfriend (and why), that your boss is an a-hole and photos that you think are going to gain you fame, fortune and thousands of “likes”. But think for 5 seconds before you post. Ask yourself how important it is for you to share this particular moment in time. If you are 22, pretend for an instant you are 32. If you are 52, pretend you are dead. When you post to social networks (no matter how “protected” you think you are) there is probably a way around its privacy settings for the very determined to access your information.

Consider for 5 more seconds, though, this short-attention span thing. It works both ways. You may think there is an army (or one person) out there who will go to great lengths to access your online information. Think again. That army (or person) probably won’t have the bandwidth – or the savvy – to dig for days to uncover and unlock your Instagram account.

3. Consider something more intimate. A private Tumblr or Blogger blog, perhaps? Both of these are easy, fun and free ways to create an online timeline, diary or collection of photos, videos, personal opinions – rantings, ravings or rumblings. You can use these so-called “online tools” from the privacy of your desktop, laptop or mobile device to post whatever the heck you want. You can keep access to this site 100% private (i.e., for those who are unfamiliar with that concept or perhaps have forgotten about it, it means no one knows about this site but you). Or, you can give select friends, family and colleagues access via a private link (warning: slippery slope ahead).

Bottom line? Even if you password protect this private online site; even if you don’t tell a soul about it, of course, it can be compromised. Do you remember keeping a journal? Writing in a notebook and stashing it somewhere in your bedroom where you thought your mom or your siblings could never find it? Guess what? They did. Same could probably happen with your super-duper, password protected, firewalled within an inch of its being extremely personal and confidential blog. It might not be mom who finds your innermost thoughts. It might be a potential employer or that WikiLeaks guy or one of the Murdochs. But if you’re that worried about it, simply “never put anything in writing” (or in more current terms, “never press the share, publish of upload button”).

Obviously, lots more common sense can be added to these three tips to locking down your online accounts. The very private among us will always feel compromised when it comes to how much to share, when and where. They will argue that it’s not fair that they can’t post that great sunrise photo they just took on Instagram because somebody they went to high school with 20 years ago, worked with 10 years ago, or met randomly 5 minutes ago might see it. If that’s the case, you’ve got to let go of Instagram (or Facebook or Twitter or Insert Social Network not named – or not yet invented – here). The concept of social networking is really not for you. You can’t have your free cake and expect CIA-level security with it, too.

Buzz & Gossip: Ashton Kutcher, Steve Jobs, Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin & Condi Rice

After some of the tough online conversations we seemed to be having this year, this week was like a breath of fresh spring April air.

Exhibit A is this “bad ass” photo of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, rocking a a Blackberry like no one else can and apparently texting behind some designer shades. The photo went viral early in the week, and by Thursday had spawned this totally hawt Tumblr, “Texts from Hillary”. Wouldn’t you like to be on the receiving end of one of these? Or maybe you wouldn’t. Hil calls out the Prez, Sarah Palin, Condi Rice, Colin Powell, Anthony Weiner, hubby Bill and even Oprah. In spite of those snarks, I think you’ll sleep better tonight knowing Madame Secretary is busy “running the world.”

Instagram, the super-popular iPhone app that turns any picture into one almost as cool as Hillary Clinton sending a text in shades, released a version for Android devices. iPhone fans didn’t like all the the “inferior” camera phones now allowed in their playground. A mini-Twitter war erupted over whether the iPhone was the king of all smartphones or not. A dustup that CNNTech dismissed as a “first world problem” if ever there was one.

Jeremy Lin, New York Knicks basketball one-hit wonder, was back in the news this past week. After taking basketball fans by storm earlier this year with some amazing antics on the court, the point guard needed knee surgery. He held an online Facebook chat with fans just hours after the anesthesia wore off, but needed to take a break during the chat to throw up. Will this be how “Linsanity” ends?

In other light news:

• Actor and tech investor Ashton Kutcher will play the late Steve Jobs in an upcoming indie film.
• A boycott by the anti-gay National Organization for Marriage (NOM) against Starbucks that led to increased profits for the coffee chain resulted in a parody report that said Apple and Microsoft had banded together to demand NOM boycott them, too.
• Facebook can make you think you’re fat.
• And if you sign online petitions, retweet about #Kony2012 and update your status on a regular basis asking friends to help you save the whales and/or cure cancer, you might just be a “slacktivist”.

Photography & Creativity Meets Left Brain Thinking: Instagram on the Android

True confession. I love Instagram! I’ve been using it for more than a year and have posted nearly 150 photos, first with my trusty old iPhone 3G and now with my constant companion the iPhone 4S.

As an iPhone user, I guess it was mostly lost on me in the beginning that the Instagram app was only available for Apple products. We iPeople do tend to live in our own world sometimes, a neighborhood, if you will, one described this week as “a gated community“. It’s a precious place where only the artistic and creative (and those who appreciate them) tend to flock and espouse that technology can have “taste”, as our late guru Steve Jobs insisted upon.

I don’t know much about Android products, even though my partner uses them (and therefore doesn’t even know what an “Instagram” is). When she hands me her Samsung phone while driving and asks me to answer a call or read the directions, the object is so foreign in my hands, so, um…distasteful, that I invariably cut off the caller or lose the Google map. She equates this with left brain/right brain thinking. Left brainers handle logic and information In fact, they downright “get it” on the first pass. Right brainers think conceptually. We’re ruled by artistry, empathy and emotion. Which no doubt leads to increased purchases of iPhones and downloading the Instagram app.

This week the Android masses, the left brainers, are being allowed into the iPeople playground. Instagram is now available for Android products. And the backlash has begun with digs on Twitter that the gated community has turned into a “Section 8″ housing project.

According to CNNTech,  “More than 1 million Android users downloaded the [Instagram] app in the first 24 hours.” And for many of us who have had Instagram all to ourselves, that’s an overwhelming influx of new users who may not get the unwritten rules of Instagram-land. These include uploading only your best photos and doing that incrementally. No matter how great your shots were from that road trip last week, please don’t add all 127 photos at once. Save that hooligan-type behavior for Facebook.

My response to the trampling of my gated community has been twofold. I haven’t followed anyone new yet this week, and I’ve told my partner that she can now download Instagram for her Samsung. She didn’t seem even remotely interested.

Sources: CNNTech, “iPhone Snobbery Greets Instagram’s Android App” by Doug Gross and ReadWriteWeb,“6 Effective Ways to Get More Instagram Followers” by John Paul Titlow.

Why You Should Make Your Blog Content Like a Mix Tape

Todaymade.com has got me dancing again. They’ve equated blogging with a making a mix tape. Suddenly I feel all those years holed up in my suburban bedroom, trying to “Shhhhs” out the noise and hope my mother didn’t yell “Supper!” in the middle of one of my tracks had some meaning after all. I was preparing to become a big-time blogger when I grew up.

Since blogs didn’t exist yet, and wouldn’t for the first half of my working life, the mix tape metaphor came in handy while I worked as an editor. As the cassette gave way to the CD and ultimately the playlist, the song essentially remained the same. Set the mood, introduce something new or unexpected, but bring it all together into a comfort zone that lets your listener get into the groove and become one with your content.

As Todaymade breaks it down,

Making a mix tape is basically a way to help introduce another person to music she might not otherwise hear but would likely enjoy if she did. There are thousands and thousands of songs and bands out there, some better than others. By putting together a mix tape, the task of finding good music and new bands is made much simpler. 

It’s the same way with our blog. The internet is flooded with content. Just like a curator at a museum, we find the best content and present it to our readers in a way that saves them the trouble of finding it for themselves. It also tells them that we’re willing to do the work of sifting through a massive amount of information to bring them what they want to read.

By taking it on ourselves to find outside content for our blog, we build trust with our readers by showing them that we’re not just about forcing our own message on them, yet we still maintain editorial control over what they read. Curators and editors and makers of mix tapes don’t create the content, but they control the mix and by doing so, control the message.

Deejay, curator, editor-in-chief. A good blogger gets to wear all these hats. Get up and boogie or bring it down, we control the volume and subsequently the mood.

Source: Todaymade.com, “Why Your Blog Is Like a Mix Tape”.

Hoodies in the House and Pink Bowling Balls

If you were a space alien, or maybe just offline for a couple of days, and then logged on you’d wonder what the heck exactly people were talking about online this week! I know I would – hoodies in the House and pink bowling balls!? Has America lost its mind!?

The division and polarization in the United States during this election year would be laughable if it were limited simply to images and tweets of a U.S. Representative wearing a gray hoodie on the House floor or a little boy choosing a pink bowling ball to roll a strike. But these two trending terms this week on our social media networks – “hoodies” and “pink bowling balls” – are code for the ugly racist and homophobic rhetoric that is stemming from the killing of Trayvon Martin, a black teen in Florida who was shot by a white man and the presidential campaign of notoriously homophobic ex-Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum.

Space aliens and Americans who’ve been offline will be shocked to know that there are people in America who think it’s okay to shoot and kill a black person if he is on or near your property while wearing a hoodie sweatshirt. There are people in America who think it’s okay to tell little boys that having anything to do with the color pink – even a pink bowling ball! – will make them gay. For anyone who thought feminism knocked down gender stereotypes and made it okay for little boys to play with pink, need we remind you that this division and polarization was merely taking a week off from attacking women. While Rush Limbaugh remains on the air, we hear his advertisers really are down, in spite of his protests to the contrary.

Meanwhile, other online buzz this week included:

• Women knitters and crocheters are having the last laugh, sending homemade “ladyparts” crafts to offensive lawmakers who want want to take away rights, health care and force needless invasive procedures upon us.
• Facebook and other social networks are looking into status updates that indicate a user is suicidal and how to get that person help that might save their life.
• Some people in that ideal smartphone demographic (under 40, urban, professional) are still using “dumbphones”; and
• Pinterest users like to buy things.

Confusion at the Border for Same-Sex Couples

A small item in the news this week reveals that the sub-agency of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that polices our borders and ports-of-entry is making plans to recognize same-sex couples so that more families can file a single Customs Declaration form when returning from travel abroad. If implemented, the new rules will mean that you and your partner will be able to fill out one customs form when you arrive in America and you will finally be able go up to the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer’s desk together.

This simple step, one that heterosexual married couples take for granted, will apparently save the federal government up to 75,000 hours a year of customs agents’ time. Same-sex couples travel a lot!

But there’s a catch: even though that CBP officer serves two functions (customs and immigration control), that form only reflects that same-sex couples will be recognized as a family for the purposes of the customs part. As for immigration? If you’re in a same-sex binational relationship like me, an American citizen legally married to an Australian, you will continue to be regarded as “legal strangers.” That means being separated at the border.

My Australian wife has managed to stay in America for 11 years on a combination of work visas that have led to her successful filing for and approval of a green card. However, because of the current state of US immigration, green card processing is backlogged for several years.

While we wait for the backlog to clear, we will continue to be separated when re-entering America until someone in the Obama Administration figures out how to undo the double-talk and tiptoeing around the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and understands the impact of the real harm that this unconstitutional law causes.

When Viki and I re-enter the US, I go to the line that says “US Citizens and Permanent Residents”. Viki goes to the line for “Visitors” where she is fingerprinted, photographed and asked about her employment. My name is never mentioned, because at the border, our marriage is meaningless. Once again we are reminded of that dreadful terminology under which our relationship falls thanks to DOMA – “legal strangers.”

It is frustrating for us both as I collect the baggage and wait…and sometimes wait for what seems like a very long time, which sets off a panic. I become agitated, experience heart palpitations and my hands start to sweat. I fear that after a long plane ride, without much sleep Viki will misunderstand a question, lose her composure, be taken into secondary and have no way to contact me, in spite of having complied with every immigration requirement at every step of her journey to becoming a US permanent resident.

I am all too familiar with stories of same-sex binational couples being forcibly torn apart at the gate and entry denied to the foreign spouse. Reasons range from a customs official’s assessment that someone is entering the US too frequently on a tourist visa or a snafu in the paperwork. We are only ever one immigration officer’s opinion away from Viki being taken into secondary and questioned as to why she doesn’t have a green card yet. She’s been asked this once by an official who thought everyone who had an H1B visa for 6 years automatically got their green card – or left the country.

Just as you know what you’ll do in your home if there is an earthquake or a fire, I know what I will do if Viki does not eventually emerge from customs. I will call her immigration lawyer (as she won’t be allowed to make a phone call to him, much less me). I will call my friends at Out4Immigration and I will call the dynamic attorney who is single-handedly stopping deportations of same-sex foreign partners of US citizens, Lavi Soloway of Stop the Deportations: The DOMA Project.

I know that because Viki does indeed have a valid work visa, the “misunderstanding” will be cleared up. At my most irrational point while waiting to see my wife’s face again, smiling, and back on American linoleum at the baggage carousel, unscathed, I know if it’s not, we’ll move to Australia. While we also cannot enter that country together until we take the steps to have our relationship recognized by their federal government for immigration purposes, Australia does allow its citizens to sponsor same-sex partners for residency. That’s a huge step ahead of America.

But as an American citizen, that’s not the point. Our relationship should be recognized here by the federal government and we should have access to the 1,138 federal rights that DOMA currently bars same-sex couples from receiving. Incidentally, one of these rights is the right of an American citizen to sponsor their foreign partner for a green card. That’s one area where the green card backlog seems nonexistent. There’s a very good chance at some point DOMA will be repealed and I will be able to file a marriage-based application for Viki’s green card. That might come sooner than the backlog for work-based green cards is cleared.

Some brave same-sex binational couples working with Lavi Soloway are already challenging the spousal green card ban and filing applications. Like those attempting to enter the country through a border crossing with proper passports and visas in tow, who are at the mercy of a discerning customs official, these couples are at the mercy of an immigration judge, a deportation officer, an Immigration & Customs Enforcement prosecutor, or the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service bureaucracy – in some cases, all of them. Will the judge take into consideration the Obama Administration’s declaration in 2011 that DOMA is unconstitutional and hold a green card application in abeyance until DOMA is repealed? Or will a subsequent president come to power and decide to defend DOMA in court and unravel the small steps we’ve made toward getting DOMA off our backs and out of our lives?

Same-sex couples in general have their hands full with daily doses of discrimination and homophobia, but for those of us in binational relationships, the discrimination and homophobia always seem just a little closer to home. Maybe that’s because our home here in the United States is on such shaky ground, just one immigration official’s opinion away from shaking it to its very foundation. The fact that US customs is making plans to recognize same-sex couples at the border is a positive step. It opens the dialog for same-sex binational couples to point out that little fixes to inequality here and there will never be enough. Our marriages need access to all 1,138 federal rights, not just a few.

Social Media and Haight Street: A Tale of One Street in Two Parts

A new social media study by Bloom Studios takes a look at data visualization, something that sounds a little boring if you’re not into studying the deep mechanics of social media. But what’s sure to grab many people’s attention about this study is that it examines social media trends on one of the world’s most famous streets – Haight Street in San Francisco.

Most likely, if you’ve visited San Francisco once or twice as a tourist, you’ve made the pilgrimage to the street that launched the Summer of Love. You’ve found the epicenter of the hippie movement at the corner of Haight and Ashbury and you looked for the houses where Janis Joplin lived and the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane crashed. By heading up the hill, past Buena Vista Park, following the smell of patchouli oil and marveling at the size of the bongs in the local head shops you discovered the Upper Haight. If you’ve taken the long way and crossed Divisadero Street before your ascent you would have been in the Lower Haight. The Bloom Studios study reports some highly distinctive trends between these two sections of the street.

For one, according to local Lower Haight Street blog Haighteration, people in the Lower Haight are grumpier. The study’s analysis of “Foursquare checkins, crime data from DataSF.org, images from Google Street View, languages and topics from Twitter, and pictures from Instagram” found that Lower Haighters negative social media commentary outweighed the positive. Up in the Upper Haight, the mood was decidedly more positive.

Having lived at the crossroads of Upper and Lower Haight for several years, I feel this is pretty easy to explain. Lower Haight is local. Unless you’re an in-the-know traveler accessing some good local apps or carting around a tattered copy of Lonely Planet you probably won’t spend much time here. Lower Haighters are going about their local business, picking up the dry cleaning, looking for a parking space, trying to get a table at The Grind on a Saturday morning. Last year, the Walgreens burned down, so now you can’t even replenish your basic sundries in the ‘hood.

Meanwhile, Upper Haight is filled with tourists happily texting and tweeting in Swedish or sometimes French (according to the Bloom Studios assessment of languages used on the street). If they notice the homeless people and the grime, they are either oblivious or on holiday – it’s not distracting enough to document. Upper Haighter residents don’t spend a lot of time on this part of the street. For their day-to-day they cross a few blocks in either direction to Cole Valley, or the up-and-coming Divisadero Corridor.

While the Bloom Studios study obviously has some flaws and odd skews (could the abundance of tweets in Thai from the Lower Haight be coming from the kitchens at Phuket and Thep Phanom?), it is a first step in using social media data readily available to gain insight into numerous habits and trends happening in a certain place. Future studies could reveal much valuable hyperlocal information for businesses and residents alike.

Source: Haighteration.
Photo source: KazzaDrask Media.

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