Heidi Allen Digital Strategy

You may have different personal and professional social media accounts within one application (like a private facebook page and a professional one, or two YouTube accounts) – as someone emailed me recently,

…there are many interfaces and how to manage them all? This can be a very resource hungry experience without a good process

It get’s difficult if you have to keep logging out of one account and going into into another. Here is a time saver that I am using based on Bookmark folders and Browsers.

Managing personal and professional accounts

1. List all of the sites you have and divide them into personal or professional
2. Open your browser (a browser is what you use to browse the web with, for example: internet explorer, or firefox, safari, chrome)
3. Open all your personal  accounts and bookmark them.  Save them onto your bookmarks toolbar.
   (Note, if your toolbar is already  full put the bookmarks into folders – I’ve done a screen shot below)
4. Open a different browser and go through the same exercise with your professional accounts

You now have your accounts separated, and can switch easily between the two without having to log out of accounts. If there are some accounts that you use regularly you can set them to open automatically.

How does this work in practice?

I have two identities – Heidi Allen and associated social media accounts, and Body In Mind (health and research) and associated social media accounts.  How to manage them day to day at the same time?

Heidi Allen

All accounts here are in my firefox browser. Here are the tabs that open automatically and the folders

And here is what is in one of my folders (Heidi Allen Profile) if I need it

Body In Mind

All accounts here are in my Google Chrome browser – again, here are the tabs that open automatically and the folders (this time Body in Mind Profile folder)

I have the same bookmark folders in both browsers but you could have one set on each browser – and if your life is blissully simple and you only have a few accounts – stick to one browser!

Vegard – I hope this develops our discussion further from the previous Digital Strat post.

Social media takes a lot of time, is rewarding, informative and good for my brain cells, but it takes a lot of time. I watched Randy Pausch’ lecture on Time Management on a recommendation from Jinnan (excellent blog, Wisdom of the Cloud, worth a peek). What I hasn’t realised is that this healthy looking, interesting guy had pancreatic cancer and a few months to live.  Time management was now in a different context.

• This thing I’m about to start doing – why am I doing it? What will happen if I don’t do it?
• Doing the right things adequately is much more important than doing the wrong things beautifully
• Someone who had made a list of 100 things to do in your life said ‘if I’m not working on those 100 things why am I working on the others?’

Covey’s time management

Do number 2 before number 3 and you become someone who has time

Other things that stood out:

• Find your creative time and defend it ruthlessly. Find your dead time and use it for phone calls, exercise etc
• The To do list – break it into small bits or it becomes too hard and do the ugliest thing first – absolutely.
• The 80:20 rule -this works great: 20 percent of my effort will give me 80 percent result. I can spend a lot of extra time making one thing perfect, or achieve another 3 things in that time. Good enough is OK.
• Dreams give us the first step to accomplishing what we dream about, and gives us a way of acknowledging that this is what we want.
• You don’t find time you make it by electing not to do something else.
• An interruption can be 4-6 mins on average but it takes another 4 mins to get your head space back. 5 interuptions is one hour gone
• Identify why you aren’t enthusiastic about doing the task at hand – more often than not because you’re afraid of being embarrassed because you don’t think you’re going to do it well.
• Sometimes you have to ask for help.
• Praise and thanks is better than monitory reward or a plaque (or an email from HR). Thank you cards (pen and ink) are rare, and, will make you memorable in your interactions with people. I have a good friend who has sent several handwritten cards which I keep on my bookshelf, because they made me feel good when I see them.

Time is all we have.

Randy Pausch was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in September 2006. He died died July 25, 2008, at the age of 47.

His lecture ‘Achieving your childhood dreams’ has over 10million views on YouTube, given Carnegie Mellon in September 2007

I’m challenged to think about my dreams and what it is I want out of life.