New Year’s Non-resolutions

First of all, a belated “Happy New Year” to you all!

I’m not a big maker of New Year’s resolutions, never have been. Not that I haven’t made resolutions, or attempted to make a personal commitment or an effort to change something, just that I tend not to see the New Year as an excuse for doing it.

That said, there are however a couple of things at the front of my mind which I guess could be considered New Year’s resolutions:

Procrastination – OUT

“Work out loud” – IN

So what do I mean with these?

Following the Christmas break, and a chance to relax, take stock and reflect on the year gone by, one thing I felt personally was that my online “energy levels” had dropped, or were rather being consumed by other things. To be honest, this was leading to a level of frustration. I seemed to be finding myself slipping into a rut of procrastination around things which previously had simply flowed.

So resolution #1, out with procrastination, it’s a horrid word anyway!

I then asked myself whether this frustration was coming from what I was perceiving to be a lack of “presence” or participation?

Which brings us nicely to resolution #2. “Working out loud” is a phrase I’ve heard often and even used on occasion in conversation around Enterprise 2.0 and social collaboration. For me it amounts to one heavy-hitting use case for C3, and sums up nicely my thoughts when discussing the evils of email for example. It is more of an attitude or behavioural approach to our work, rather than a specific action or technique, and revolves around a proactive commitment to doing as much of our work as possible out in the open. I should probably also state for the record that I’m not going to pretend we can all “work out loud” to the same extent. Neither is it realistic to expect everything we do be out in the open, there are times when things need to be kept private or be done offline. In fact, I believe an important aspect of “working out loud” involves an awareness and understanding of the intended and appropriate audience for our work.

I hope to go into more detail on this in future posts. Today’s is meant to simply serve as a reminder to myself to do more where I can in this area, and hopefully help me keep resolution #1!

What do you think, worthy New Year’s resolutions? What about yours?