Inside View

How I was influenced during COVID

I CHANNELED MOST of my attention to trusted voices throughout the COVID-19 phase of my life. Those voices often appeared in the apps on the second screen of my phone (above). Jamie Knightley points out that during the same time period, COVID redefined the value and influence of traditional PR.

Told to Get a COVID Test

THE REPORTING OF more than 600 daily cases of Covid-19 for the first time since late April was a “cause of concern”, the chief medical officer warned today, the same day we were notified by a close contact that she had COVID. A few hours later, a text message offered us a tracking number to be used when we presented to take our COVID tests a few miles away.

Journaling with Speech Bubbles and Keyboard Entries

I TEACH JOURNALING to Media Writing students and for the next three years I plan to enhance that creative process with a few specific tips. One is to require a double spread page of speech bubbles and another task is to show a page that emerges from text input on a keyboard. I believe the Media Writing Journals I will review will have greater creative content at the end of the semester.

Deaths During Christmas

ON THE RUN-UP TO CHRISTMAS, we've had several sad events unfold near our home. First, an arthritic cat adopted us and was deemed so ill that our vet recommended putting her to sleep. Then a neighbour a few doors down died of a heart attack in his home. And now a steady parade of cars park outside our front door as an elderly man works his way through his final days of terminal cancer.

My first two hours with @RoamResearch

I USED A TIMER to allow myself two hours for my first hands-on routine with Roam Research, a note-taking and personal knowledge management service that I used to produce this InsideView.ie blog post. I'm confident that if I could save at least 15 euro a month by focusing my note-taking inside Roam because I could reduce my annual consumption of Moleskine journals (see samples in my photostream below). I'm still going to use pen and paper for some of my sketchnotes but the recurring tasks were always more efficient using a template. During my two hour stint with Roam, I created several of those templates and I linked them to the left hand panel (seen above) that displays when Roam launches.

Planning for a World without an Office Water Cooler

ONE OF THE BIGGEST concerns I have about being locked out of work is losing any sort of internal communications. Since we cannot meet casually around a coffee dock or chat at a table in the canteen, I'm trying to use apps (in the screenshot) that give me meaningful online pulse points.

Listen to "Planning Better Home Screen Newsfeeds E494" on Spreaker.

As I write this, I realise I have no watering hole for staff communications. We have no listserv, no online commons area. More than ever, we need to leverage Microsoft Teams.

Sticking with What Works #resolutions

KNOWING FULL WELL what works when I stick with good resolutions, I'm rewarming 2018 and 2019 resolutions and going with confronting and executing three numbers every day, numbers that happen to be on many of the batteries we're using with a home automation project. They are the numbers three, seven, and 1000. Each holds a specific meaning that Paul O'Mahony encouraged me to set when he first shared the concept of sticking with easy-to-grasp sequences.

My First Leuchtturm 1917

A LEUCHTTURM 1917 joins 200 other A5 journals (mostly Moleskines) that I've used since 1997. These journals are part of a refined note-making process.

At my mobile desk with @patphelan in my ears

I FEEL VERY INCOMPLETE when I fail to share snippets of life across different forms because no matter how hard I try to enjoy the ephemeral state of Instagram Stories, I get much more joy out of hearing people talk about their daily lives. And the written word resonates with me even more.

So I'm taking some time away from grading papers to share a five minute snippet of my daily work flow. And in the middle of the recording, I heard @patphelan offer a new technique for managing noise. His clarion voice came through the loud fan noise of our local canteen and he offers advice worth considering. You can scrub forward in the audio clip below to see Pat's screenshot and hear his comment.

Five More Welcome Addresses #edchatie

I HAVE FIVE MORE welcoming addresses to enjoy before I hang up my whiteboard markers. Today, I'm taking notes in a yellow Moleskine journal during the annual welcoming address. As in previous years, I plan to annotate some notes with rectangles, some with stars, and some with exclamation points. Each of those annotations indicates a call to action I should consider.