John @ Sandaig Primary  -

I am no longer, as of October 2008 working as a class teacher at Sandaig, so have moved this blog to another server. If you want to comment on this post, pleas search for it there.

21 10 06 Giving up blogging and getting things done

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A while back I read Andrew's' post Fighting Addiction about spending too much time reading his feeds and working outside school hours and it has been nagging at my brain for a long time.
I don't blog or read other blogs in school time I mostly do it from home. Same goes for most of the development of the school website; writing the html setting up blogs etc. I spend a lot of my free time in front of my mac, no one asked me to, but that is how my life has developed.
Some of it is spent on non educational things, I do a bit of web-development and even used to write simple shareware and freeware (ok that was educational).
For a while I though blogging might develop my career but that has not happened. So I have started paying attention to how much time this eats up and it is a lot. On a free day (weekend, holiday) I get up early, email, feeds, follow links, comment, follow links, write a post, check a few class blogs and try and comment, email again, write a post, check feeds and so on and so on. It is always interesting, but it is unproductive and pays no bills.

So I am starting to think this blogging is getting in the way of

1. Real life
2. Other parts of my computer-life I enjoy and occasionally makes a wee bit of money (Web-dev, not shareware)

So I've started to analyse what is taking up all the time, what can I give up to free up time for fun and profit. Time sucks:

• Reading email, reading email as my mailer beeps, looking for stuff I need to do in my inbox.
• Reading Feeds, following links (recursive), looking at my aggregator when growl tells me to.
• Blogging, writing posts, this take a really long time, especially posts where I think as I go, describing a process and look for a conclusion, linking things together.
• Going between several jobs in a random fashion, driven by mail's beep and Vienna's growl

I got to the stage where I was talking to Ewan the other day and I am thinking of stopping blogging, popped out of my mouth. Since them I've been mulling it over weighing up the pros and cons. Making a plan:

• Email Keeping your email inbox under control in the Saturday Guardian a very simplified version of Gtd, I've been reading about this at 43 folders for an age and Ewan has be going on about it for a while but it looks way to complex for my needs, but Oliver Burkeman's Guardian piece was simple enough to carry out:

  Before:
  
  After:
  

  I think I am off to a good start on this one, i've got 3 messages in my inbox and half a dozen in my ToDo folder after a week of testing this out.
  The other thing i am trying, is that if I have some computer work to do, I don't open mail.app until I've done an hour.
• Reading blogs I am going to try a similar sort of simplification. Read my aggregator once a day, flag, mark as read ruthlessly, unsubscribe from a lot of major edu bloggers (mainly in the usa), I'll pick up their interesting threads from more local friends. I get more out of practical teachers blogs than the theorists/keynoters (over simplification, but I don't need evangelised). I've unsubscribed from a pile of news feeds as I read the paper every day and I am looking to cut down on the feeds I just skim.
• Blogging I've got so much out of blogging in the last couple of years I don't want to stop, but it is probably the biggest problem. The posts that take the most time are ones sparked by other blogs, where I am thinking out-loud trying to make sense of things. I've realised that these posts litter my Hard Drive, but don't usually make it to the blog (when they do they usually don't make much sense). So I am going to stop writing those ones, I can think about them, but I don't need to type or spell check them.
  Mainly I want to share what my class/ school are doing, hopefully gaining them an audience, document practice; test things out that might be useful; point to other interesting things on the net. So that is what I am going to blog about, short and hopefully sweet posts.

So I am set for a more effective, productive and diverse online life, I hope so.

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Hi John,
It doesn’t sound like you’re quitting blogging but just getting your priorities straight – and kudos to you for thinking this bit out loud for the benefit of us all. I need to run my life with an empty inbox and only a dozen or so things in the next action tray. I need to have no paper hanging around my desk. I need to be able to hit the weekend without worrying about things that have happened in the week – Friday mornings have become sacred.

I hope we can still bounce ideas off each other and share the Good Things this lark can bring us. I’ve been thinking about blogging, too, recently but don’t know if these will end up on the blog quite yet. More likely in a pub near you
Ewan McIntosh (Email) (URL) - 21 10 06 - 21:03

Hi John,
I’ve only got into edublogs in the last week. I’ve been off and my reading/feeding/deliciousising/etc has been, in a word, feverish.

I’ve been on the internet from the (in retrospect) tender age of 12 (Kurt Cobain was still alive) and I am close to addicted – so in the class, i’ve always stepped back from technology to avoid letting my passions get ahead of practical, good teaching.

After reading blogs, especially this one and others like it, I am giving serious thought to my technological endeavours. I’m a programmer at heart – I want to hack together new educational tools, new structures that help students learn etc – but I am worried that this will come at the expense of developing as a teacher. Carried-away-syndrome, you could call it. For instance, yesterday I spent a whole day writing a php script to take del.icio.us tagged links, export them to a database, then turn them into OPML, which I can use to automatically add new blogs tagged scot-edu-blog to my feed reader.

So I think I see where you are coming from – I’m so interested in doing all this stuff, but i know there’s no point unless it improves what happens in my class. I’m not coming up with any rules to help apart from this: Keep it simple. I’ll do the normal blog/feedy/regular wee checks thing. I’ll not invest all my time customising wikis/blogs for the kids – they can use basic blogging tools effectively. I’ll see how that goes, then guage what I should do.

So thanks for this entry – as it is food for thought for me at the moment

PS one rule I should maybe add to my list is “cut down on ridiculously verbose entries”....
Peter (Email) (URL) - 22 10 06 - 00:44

Hi Ewan, priorities slightly less tangled I hope. There are too many Good Things to go silent, I’ll see you in the pub, there are something not fit for polite companynPeter, the php thing sounds intriguing, I was pondering the daftness of auto downloading the whole wiki and running through it checking for links and then auto-discovering rss, you idea sounds much saner. maybe the next teachmeet should be combined with a hackday
John Johnston (Email) (URL) - 22 10 06 - 08:26

I think you’re right about the wiki – difficult to track growth, what’s new etc. The PHP thingy (that’s about as technical as I get sounds just the ticket – if people knew how to tag their blogs. As a year ago people found adding to a wiki novel they might find this just as doable a year from now.

A HackDay would be cool because there’s some serious SecondLife coding I would like to learn and I know plenty of geeks who would want to add their skills and learn from others.

I’m co-organising Scotland’s first BarCamp and, when the ad comes around, I’d love to see you guys add your names – it’s for coders and geeks as much as businessmen and companies. Its aim is also to provide business opps to the likes of yourselves.
Ewan McIntosh (Email) (URL) - 22 10 06 - 09:30

Hi John,
I’m glad my thoughts helped in some small way – we all need to realise that whilst technology helps us connect to a wider world, the most important world is our immediate surroundings, which I think we often overlook. Besides, in the pub you’ll meet people of diversity! Good luck kicking a habit!
On a serious note, I think we all need to focus on what we know most about – in reality what I gain from reading you is technical gems and what you are up to in the classroom.
Andrew (Email) (URL) - 22 10 06 - 13:06

Hi Andrew,
I wonder if you could help even more, I subscribe to Macromedia XML News Aggregator most of which shoots way over my head, do you know a good simple plus news flash blog?
John Johnston (Email) (URL) - 23 10 06 - 22:49

I know exactly how you feel!!!!!:(
Bob Hill (Email) (URL) - 24 10 06 - 21:58

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I am no longer, as of October 2008 working as a class teacher at Sandaig, so have moved this blog to another server. If you want to comment on this post, pleas search for it at: http://www.johnjohnston.info/blog.