Rich Mintz  

I’m not currently getting the Times (it’s stolen out of my building’s vestibule so often that I recently cancelled it), but fortunately Tim Kreider’s essay “The Busy Trap” appeared online as a blog post, and everyone and his brother tweeted it to me last week.

Since I read it I’ve been chewing on it, and I just read it again, and … hmm. And that’s a “hmm” of recognition. The following three things are true of me, of every member of my family, and of virtually everyone I know (there’s a short list of exceptions I can count on my fingers):

1. They’re too busy — they have too much “stuff” going on to take care of or even keep track of.
2. They see this as a problem.
3. They think there’s nothing they can do about it.

Being too busy to let life happen is, of course, a problem, and during the 25 years of my adult life, it’s certainly gotten worse. I’m certainly not immune to this — and I’ve been fortunate enough (for many reasons) to have been able to fashion a career and a life that’s structured largely according to my specifications. I don’t have kids, am senior enough at work that I am generally cut slack whenever I ask for it, and still I feel like I’ll never, ever “catch up.”

Consider (and this is journalistic evidence, not me bitching, so hush): on an average day I get about hundred and twenty emails, or approaching a thousand a week. Each of them requires some action; about a third of them require ten minutes or more of attention; 20 or so would require half an hour or more of attention to deal with properly (so I put them off and put them off and, if I’m lucky, their moment passes). You do the math; I’m not going to do it, it’s too depressing.

If I may point out the obvious: although much of the team collaboration and “networking” that I’m involved in happen in email, answering email is not the most important part of my job. But email is quantifiable, and it keeps coming, so I keep answering.

The rise of social media, which everyone loves and everyone complains about, is more of a symptom of our busyness than a cause of it. (To be fair to the Internet, I was feeling overwhelmed even 15 years ago, and a lot of the tasks that the Internet makes it possible to take care of easily in a few minutes now used to take hours or days of worrying and working.)

Everyone (including Kreider, who describes his in the essay) has a couple of friends who have “opted out.” I don’t mean the hopeless schlimazels who can’t get their lives together; I mean grownups who are living fully realized lives, lives they’re proud of in the long view and are enjoying in the short view; but who have time to relax and take stock and to breathe; who don’t constantly feel like they’ve forgotten to do something and forgotten what it is.

I’ve spent a lot of my private time (yes, I do have it) over the past two years or so trying to figure out how to get out of the “busy trap.” In the short term, that will require two things: (a) better control over what’s on my “list,” and (b) better boundaries (e.g., between work time and non-work time; between work activities and non-work activities; between things I have agreed to do, even implicitly, and things I have not agreed to do). I’m working on all those.

In the long term, though, getting out and staying out of the “busy trap” may require some more radical change. I’m not foolish enough to think that a change of scenery is what’s required (on the contrary, New York City is emphatically one of the most lovely places on earth to enjoy being unbusy), but I may reach a point at which a change in the structure of my work life is needed. Who knows. Life is long.

In the meantime, intermittently as I find the energy and focus to do so, I’m trying to do things like these:

• Be alone every day. Carve out time to be by myself in a quiet place, doing nothing in particular. Note that being alone doing nothing in particular is not the same as being in the same room with someone else doing nothing in particular; so when you don’t live alone, even if you have no children, this is harder than it sounds. But it’s important — it’s in silence and in solitude that epiphanies come knocking.
• Find writing time every day (like right now), and try to do it in conditions that induce reflection and self-analysis. (I find that cafes with a low hum of activity work well, as does sitting on my couch with Kathy Griffin nattering on in the background. On the other hand, sitting at a desk in a dead-quiet room is THE WORST, JERRY.)
• Make physical activity a mandatory part of every day. I can’t stress enough what a lift a little bit of strenuous exercise — even when done alone — brings to my sense of connectedness with others. It reminds me that I live inside a body, which is as much “me” as my mind, and which is part of a physical world in which other people (and animals, and rocks, etc.) exist. For me, the activity I tend toward is bicycling in the city (because it has the secondary effect of circulating me through parts of the city I wouldn’t otherwise see), but even when all I do is get on a treadmill in an empty YMCA at 4 in the afternoon, I feel better.
• Cook and eat real food. New York’s a great city to eat delicious, creatively prepared junk food in, and I’m fortunate enough to be able to afford to buy basically whatever I want to eat whenever I feel like it. But artisanal donuts and Shake Shack burgers, as delicious as they are, in the long run are more delicious in moderation. What contributes to a sense of wholeness and peace is baking bread, making soup, roasting a chicken, putting together a fresh salad. Laugh if you like, but these things are true.
• Cut myself some slack. There’s no prize for Inbox Zero! Do your best, and then set it aside and live your life.

“Remarketing” is the phenomenon by which a retailer or commercial business that you’ve visited online (but not yet purchased from) chases you around the Internet encouraging you to come back and buy whatever it was that you were looking at.

To those of you (and I realize there may be a few) who don’t work in the Internet marketing industry, this may seem like an appalling invasion of privacy — “how do they know who I am?” but, within the bounds of the degree of anonymity that’s de facto accepted on the Internet, it makes sense. They don’t actually know who you are; they (or, more precisely, Google, which is serving up your ads) simply know which computer and browser are yours, and they contract with Google to serve ads to you later. (I’m not an expert in this by any means, I just generally understand how it works.) The ads show up on whatever page you happen to be visiting later: as you can see above, a Dragon Dictate ad followed me to YouTube.

It’s simple and brilliant, and in the right circumstances it is cost-effective — the ads perform better than the retailer’s other ads, and help them close sales that would have been lost. We at BSD have not used it extensively, but we’ve tried it, and seen it work, and others are reporting the same thin. Which is probably why I’m seeing a huge uptick in remarketing in recent weeks.

Just in the last 24 hours, that I noticed, I’ve been remarketed by Dragon Dictate, Google Chromebooks (or perhaps it’s Samsung doing the marketing), and Nau jackets, three product websites that I did indeed visit.

Often, as a potential consumer, I kind of like this. It keeps bringing my mind back to the whatever-it-is I was considering buying. The Chromebook remarketing ads might actually push me over the edge to buying a Chromebook. On the other hand, no matter how many times Nuance reminds me to buy Dragon Dictate, I won’t — because I already did, from Nuance, two weeks ago, from this very same browser! So someone needs to do a bit of tweaking.

Last week Dave Dawson pointed me to this article from WeightShift, about the convergence of graphic, print, and “new media” design. I couldn’t agree more; anyone who doesn’t see these three converging isn’t paying attention. And in my professional life — in which I spend a large share of my time helping complex, siloed organizations reshape themselves to be more effective communicators — it’s usually the case that the organizations that are hardest to work with are those that see different communications “channels” as being completely separate.

If your email calendar is shaped separately from your direct mail calendar, you’re at a disadvantage, but it’s somewhat mitigated as long as the people who perform those functions do some after-the-fact synchronizing and collaborating. But if the people who write your annual report and the people who write your newsletter and the people who write your emails are in completely separate siloes, or (worse) if they don’t even know each other, things are tougher. I won’t say “hopeless” — I’m not that kind of guy — but you really need to work to pull people together if you want to raise the kind of money and build the kind of constituency you’re aiming for.

But I’d go further. It’s not just that the various sorts of design are converging; it’s that a working knowledge of a lot of design-adjacent skills is necessary in order to design effectively in this sort of environment. I’m talking about user experience knowledge, a working understanding of HTML5 and Javascript, a clear conceptual model for how content management works, some degree of familiarity with analytics and with the economics of fundraising- and advertising-driven online programs. Without being well situated in the world, understanding how your design output impacts and is impacted by all these considerations, a significant percentage of your brilliant design work will radiate away without having the desired impact, like the waste heat given off by an incandescent light bulb.

Yule Heibel led me to Euan Semple’s blog post on creating a knowledge ecology, which is a topic I think about a lot myself.

In any collective system — a company, a community of academic or professional interest, a social group — what are the conditions under which a robust knowledge ecology is likely to flourish? By “knowledge ecology,” I mean the healthy aggregation of information and opinion, and the sharing of that information and opinion across a robust network of relationships in an organic and self-perpetuating way.

And if that’s too thinky for you, just envision the question as “What helps a content community thrive?”

At BSD, when helping people set up social media-driven online communities, we talk a lot about creating the conditions under which people are willing to be participatory. We encourage lowering the barriers to entry, to make it very easy for nervous constituents to take their first participatory step, whatever it is (signing up, signing on to a petition, and so on). We encourage watching what people respond to and doing more of that, and less of other things. We encourage storytelling, both in the macro sense (campaigns that have a long-term arc) and in the micro (messages that are rooted in the concrete experiences of real constituents and beneficiaries). We try to train organizations not to take themselves so seriously, to encourage lots of institutional voices to speak out, have a tolerance for iterative development and organic evolution and even for the occasional error.

A lot of what we advocate shows up here in Semple’s list in slightly different words, and I especially like his last point:

10. Unleash Trojan Mice. Don’t do big things or spend loads of money. Set small, nimble things running and see where they head.

The biggest no-no in trying to build a community that feels alive is trying to exert too much control. The way I usually express this is “don’t be afraid to throw a lot of spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks,” but I love Semple’s image of “Trojan mice,” because “setting things running” is an important part of the secret. The risk isn’t just overplanning, it’s also overmanagement. If you manage all the spontaneity out of things, you’ll end up with an Old West town with tumbleweeds blowing down the middle of a dusty street.

(In a similar vein, responding effectively to RFPs is a challenge because people who codify their expectations in RFP-speak have already forestalled a lot of imaginative possibility. But that’s a topic for another day.)

I’ve been away for a while, busy with this and that (i.e., life), and haven’t posted in a long while. Twitter has taken up much of the slack, but lately I’ve been feeling the pull back to the medium-to-long form. This means, dear reader, that once I figure out what to do with the 8,376 accumulated spam comments in the moderator queue, you’re going to see incrementally more posting here and incrementally less tweeting off the cuff. Exactly how big the increment turns out to be is something we’ll have to wait and see about. In the meantime, happy new year, all!

No, it’s not what you think … or is it? (Hat tip: Colin Stewart.)

Bonus “Today on Craigslist” from this weekend’s Glenn Beck rally, via Wonkette (note: subject matter not safe for work): well, I won’t post this one, but if you Google “wonkette tea party craigslist honor” you’ll probably find it…

Yesterday morning I read this blog post by Mykal Burns on John Scalzi’s blog in which he said, in essence, that once your attention is called to a thing, you will see it everywhere. In his words:

“Everyday -every day- you will have a monkey sighting. You’ll see a picture of a monkey, someone will say ‘monkey,’ you’ll hear a monkey noise, whatever. There are monkeys everyday. If you miss one, don’t worry about it; there will be others.

“A friend told me about the monkey theory five years ago. I’ve seen monkeys every single day since then. Usually several monkeys throughout the day. I can’t escape them. Now, you can’t escape them either.”

Hogwash, I thought. Bunkum! In fact, this morning, I was thinking “I should really write a blog post refudiating the monkey theory.

And then I saw this.

OOOOH, curse you, monkeys! You may have won this one…

With all the coverage of Sarah Palin’s Facebook and Twitter strategy, it’s easy to forget that a presidential election is not conducted by putting the members of each candidate’s social network on one side of a scale and seeing which side is heavier. (Obligatory joke about obese red-staters goes here.)

But would that it were! If it were, someone like Stephen Fry — actor, auteur, thoughtful social commentator — would boot that Sarah Palin right back to the hostess counter at the Wasilla Applebee’s where she belongs.

Consider:

(True, Fry wasn’t born in the United States. But then I think I read somewhere that Obama wasn’t either, and it doesn’t seem to have hurt his success any.)

Sensationalistic, of course. If you actually read the story, what they blame is radio, which is the opposite of social media.

Other comments:

(1) They use the orderly crowd at the Old 97s concert on July 4th weekend as evidence that the new crowd control measures are working. Hello — the Old 97s were a college band, what, 17 years ago? (Evidence: I own their albums. And paid money for them. On physical media. And listen to them on my old-fashioned crank-activated gramophone.) If there is a riot at an Old 97s concert, something has gone Horribly Wrong.

(2) What is a “Canadian rapper”? (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

Remember how odd (and oddly exciting) it felt when URLs (or, if you’re old enough to remember, email addresses) started to show up in artifacts of popular culture like outdoor advertising? Well, take a look at this, which I saw in the NYC subway just now:

It’s only a matter of time before you hear the word “hashtag” out loud on TV…