Kid and Caboodle

Chris, A.J. and I went to see my friend/neighbor/former boss perform with his garage band at a local restaurant tonight. It was good music for a great cause, but it was a little disconcerting to see how many of my coworkers also were there. These days with LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter I can’t help having my work and personal lives blend on the Internet, but it was a little weird to have it happen in real life as well. Also, I’ve been out of the office for the last six days and will still be out for the next three, so seeing so many of my coworkers tonight felt rather like stopping in the office while in the middle of vacation. Eh.

I am working from home this morning due to a paperwork error.

Yesterday morning, after a brief break, I discovered that my badge was no longer allowing me into my office. Upon inquiring at the guard desk, I was told that my building access had been revoked because I was no longer an employee (?!?), whereupon the guards confiscated my work ID.

A few frantic calls later, my supervisor learned that a certain administrator had filed an undated “separation notice” with my name on it. Security then deactivated my badge.

By the time we managed to convince security there had been a mistake and that I really should be allowed into the building — in all likelihood the notice was meant for an intern with the same name — they had sent in my badge for destruction. Now I need to get a piece of paper from the administration person who filed the separation notice saying that, no, I AM a valid employee so I can get a new ID. Oh, joy.

Since we have no idea when this certain administrator will be available — she has been out all week — my supervisor has told me to work from home until we can reach her. Hey, life isn’t all bad ….

Just checked the Fairfax County Public Schools emergency announcement page and learned that school has been cancelled due to snow THROUGH WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 23. This, combined with the winter break scheduled to start December 24, means that A.J. is not scheduled to go back to school again until JANUARY 4. Good grief!

It’s a good thing I was already scheduled to be off all this week and that Chris was already scheduled to be off all next week, else we’d be scrambling for child care!

As a bonus, though, the federal government (in the D.C. area) is also closed tomorrow, so Chris doesn’t have to figure out how to get to work. Believe it or not, the federal government rarely gives its workers free leave because it costs so much money. This has been one heck of a snowstorm!

1 p.m. December 20: Driveway and walk are clear, but still no sign of a snowplow.

I’ve been spending much of the afternoon going through piles of paper throughout the house.  In doing so, I found the following list of tips from an office newsletter:

Successfully Managing the Work/Life Juggling Act

If you have a family, managing work and life can be challenging — and often unpredictable.

Consider the following tips to help you successfully manage the work/life juggling act:

• Make time for fun and relaxation. When you add more leisure to your life, you’ll become a healthier and more effective employee and parent.

• Build and use support systems. People with strong support systems tend to be healthier, happier and better able to tolerate stress.

• Forget perfection. While it’s admirable to put your best efforts into your work and parenting responsibilities, it’s simply impossible to be perfect at everything you do.

• Take care of yourself. It’s easy to focus on your responsibilities to your partner, children and employer and forget about taking care of yourself.

• Be happy. Studies show that happy individuals are successful across different areas, including marriage, friendship, income, work performance, and health.

I’m not exactly sure how one can will oneself to “be happy” — does this newsletter mean “try to think positive”? But otherwise, these tips seem pretty sound.

Hmm, wonder what else I’ll find as I continue decluttering the house ….

I am really glad I work for a supervisor who allows me to work from home regularly once a week. I find I am often more productive on my telecommuting days than on the days I am in the office because I am not distracted by people constantly stopping by my desk with questions. This ability to work without interruptions is especially important when I am trying to write my weekly blog entry for work. I also can end my day later than usual if the office needs me because I don’t have to rush out the door to pick up my son from school, and I can start my day earlier when needed. Recently, for example, I began my work day at 4:30 a.m. to cover a news event.

Telecommuting not only saves me time (my daily one-way commute is over an hour), but it also saves me money because I don’t have to pay the cost of parking and the round-trip subway fare. It is also good for the environment because I don’t have to burn gas driving to and from the subway station. It’s a win-win situation, in my opinion!

I have heard people scoff at the idea of telecommuting, asking how one can measure employees’ productivity. To these people I say, “How does one normally measure productivity?” It is not how many hours I am sitting in my cubicle that makes me productive; it is how many projects I complete within a given time period. If you look at all the things I process every day — articles, podcasts, photo galleries, videos, Web pages, solutions to technical problems, etc. — you know I’m working. I am a professional; I don’t need someone standing over my desk to ensure that I am doing my job. If I were goofing off, you would know it because the number of things I process would drop.

I’m thankful that some people — if not all — understand this.

I’ve been looking at various Web sites and newspapers all week trying to find inspiration for a new post for the group blog I contribute to at work. No luck yet. I’ve noticed that lately I’ve been having bouts of writer’s block more and more often.

Well, perhaps that’s not quite accurate. What I think is happening is that I’m beginning to censor myself. I’ll read about something and think, “That’s interesting!” But then I’ll say to myself, “My blog entry has to be about democracy, human rights, or government. I can’t see how this fits with any of those topics.” At other times I’ll think, “I wrote about that already; I shouldn’t repeat myself.”

I wonder if these concerns are really important, though. Why not let the blog facilitator decide if a potential blog entry is too tangential? So far my track record has been excellent; I’ve had only one blog entry rejected as too far off-topic. True, it was annoying to have all the time I spent writing that piece wasted, but perhaps I should trust myself more. And what’s wrong with going back to an issue and exploring a different angle or looking at it in more depth? The way the blog is structured, with different writers taking turns, it might be fine to write on a specific theme for a while and have some continuity.

One complication with the blog is that I don’t exactly know when a specific blog entry will be posted. This has made me reluctant to write anything time-sensitive. But I suppose scheduling is really the job of the blog facilitator, not mine. My job is to write.

But I still don’t know what to write about this week ….

I’m off Thursday and Friday for Thanksgiving.  Somehow having a shorter work week doesn’t translate to less work to do, though; I just have to do five days’ of work in only three.  Sigh.

Haven’t written any Kid and Caboodle posts in a long time, mostly because I’ve been spending so much time “microblogging” on Twitter and Facebook that general observations and ideas aren’t usually staying in my head long enough to simmer and turn into something interesting. I’ve also been contributing to a blog for work since the end of April, so I’ve had a creative outlet for the longer pieces I can produce. I’m still trying to decide how much of a division I want between my personal and professional lives; should I keep Twitter mainly for professional material and Facebook for personal stuff?  I’m not sure it is even possible at this point to separate the two worlds since I have family members, friends and co-workers in both networks. How do others manage this balance, I wonder?

BRAIN SPEED BUMPS 

Started the morning by attending Merrill Perlman’s session on “brain speed bumps.” She presented several stories that contained mistakes and asked the audience to find them. I had a terrible time with every single one of the exercises and am thoroughly embarrassed. I hope that the problem was that I wasn’t quite awake at that hour rather than that I’ve lost my edge as an editor! 

Perlman gave a list of things that should set off alarm bells for editors and indicate that something should be double-checked in a story:

– Coincidence
– Internal inconsistency
– Repetition
– Superlatives and modifiers

She also advised editors always to check names, foreign languages, and things that are often corrected in their own publications. Perlman also warned that errors often travel in pairs.

BLOGGING ETHICS

The second morning session I attended was titled “Blogging Ethics,” and featured Bryan Murley of Eastern Illinois University, David Sullivan of the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Bill Walsh of the Washington Post.

Murley started off by comparing blog entries with print articles. Blogs entries, he said, are written in a personal style, are shorter than news articles, include hyperlinks to other stories, are narrowly focused, and can contain multimedia such as videos or audio clips.

Murley said copy editors can help bloggers by:

– authenticating links
– editing copy before it goes live
– “adding to the link economy” (giving primary sources to draw readers back to the piece)
– gauging comments
– tracking online conversations about a topic

Murley also discussed Twitter. Twitter is a conversation, he said; do NOT dump your RSS feed into Twitter. Instead, manually post selected items on Twitter with headlines written to lure readers, and engage people on Twitter in conversations. (Julio Ojeda-Zapata also made this point in the “Twitter for Journalists” session yesterday.)

Bill Walsh talked about his own experiences writing The Slot, a blog about errors he finds in copy. He noted that bloggers write about things in which they are interested, and often they are unofficial experts in the subject. This is in contrast to regular reporting, in which writers are sometimes assigned stories about which they know nothing.

David Sullivan discussed workflow. How can publications feed Twitter and update blogs quickly while ensuring the accuracy and fairness of the material being published?  These things don’t go through the normal editing process, but there still needs to be some sort of editorial review for them before they go live.  Sullivan also brought up the difference between objectivity and fairness. People have their own opinions about everything; it is part of human nature. We cannot really be objective. But we should always try our best to be fair in our coverage.

Other topics discussed included how to handle blog comments and whether to notify readers when a story on the Web has been changed.

ACES has posted its official write-ups of today’s conference sessions on “Twitter for Journalists” and “Editing With Your Mind’s Eye.” Also, attendees have posted photos from the ACES conference on flickr (mine aren’t on this page because I haven’t set up a flickr account yet).