Okay, so first?

It’s twittering. If it’s a word at all.

Secondly, it’s easy.

If you’re in  cubicle farm now, look around and tell me how many people you see who are Actually working.

If there are 25 people around you, I’m willing to bet that if you look closely, 5 people are working, 5 are doing something social that’s related to working, and 10 are just looking like they’re working.

Not because they’re lazy or stealing time from their company.

No. The people in the last two groups are doing something essential.

The human mind needs time to breathe between tasks.

I figured this out way back when I got the tapes, “Where There’s a Will, There’s an A”. I badly needed this course as a student when I came back from Africa for middle school. Because where in Africa, we learned things by understanding them, and then building on knowledge we previously had, it was different in the States.

Eventually I figured out that there was a reason why my grades had dropped  in Math and Science, even though we’d been ahead of those courses when we returned. The education system here ( which hasn’t changed in any other substantial way in 200 years – did you know that?) was more focused on the standardized testing system than it had been when we’d left.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing. In the States we rely much more heavily on memorization as a teaching method than we should, due to standardized testing and its growing importance. (I’d be fine with that if we mixed in other learning styles and gave as much weight to creative learning as we do to technical learning, since the world we live in now gives its money to people who solve problems, not those who manage or process them. But I digress.)

the point is, I’d learned a different style of absorption, so I’d have to adjust. So I found the “Where There’s a Will” course and it really did help.

My most important lesson from it was that you remember most the last thing and the first thing you read. I have no idea if there’s any science behind this but it definitely worked for me:  To achieve more retention of the facts you were memorizing, the theory was that you need to make the opportunity to remember information happen more often.

And it was then I learned to chop my learning up into smaller tasks. If I read a chapter in a half hour, I’d remember the beginning of the chapter and how it ended. But in small enough chunks? The  beginning was so close to the end I even though I couldn’t quite remember clearly, nearly all the important parts were accessible at testing time.

Read five pages. Take a break. Review the high points, next five pages.

Of course, this carried over into my professional life. It’s helped me absorb a great deal more information despite having the crappiest memory of anyone I know. And since I have this horrible tick about wasting down time (long story for another day), I had to figure out – what can I do while I’m letting my mind breathe?

When I worked in a corporate setting, that was easy.

• Get up and talk to a co-worker,
• see if my boss needs anything,
• visit another department
• and reinforce my alliances.

But the last two offices I’ve had it’s been either just me or me and one other person.

And there’s only so many times you can say hi to your one co-worker who works eight feet from you – or your own reflection – before you start to seem like a lunatic.

I prefer that no one happens upon that information before I’m ready. You understand.

Anyway. Now that most of my co-workers or people who work for me are in other states or countries, I visit them online. Which is where Twitter, Facebook, etc comes in.

You see, being able to spark acquaintances online is an ongoing task, and will take continuous follow-up on your part. However, you don’t have to feel like you have to spend an hour on each site for these connections to take place. There are plenty of tools out there that can help you automate the supporting tasks, or let you know that it’s time to follow up- including Twitter itself!

We’ll chat more another time about how to have meaningful discourse on multiple mediums without spending your whole day networking online.

Why The Connection Itself Matters Most in Social Media: 30 minute talk about the things we don’t like to admit as human beings and why they are so important.

Mentioned:

JibberJobber.com
score.org’s 2009 Score Awards
@shashib on Twitter

(wrote the post from my iPod so hyperlinks will have to come later.)

Recorded via cell phone. I previewed it via cell, so hopefully it’ll sound okay.

[download mp3]

In my last article, we talked about the wrong way to network with groups. This is one of the right ways – at least it is if you want the result of growing your business via Facebook without looking like a spammer.