Hyper Reflective

This was my second Ewan Macintosh keynote speach, and again left me thinking. Overall message I took away was get organised, and digital stuff can help you get organised. May not seem like a radical message, and in week when UNISON reveal Birmingham City Council spent £83 million on consultants in same year as 2000 jobs cut, you do sometimes end up thinking we should be working some of these things out ourselves. But hey, sometimes we do need poke in ribs to see obvious, and my work is about consultancy.

So, getting organised, what's stopping me? Well, first of all, I'm not completely disorganised (although my partner might disagree) and I do already spend a large chunk of my life negotiating between all the various parts of life, which mostly works out. However I find organising incredibly dull (partner would agree on this too - that is, organising dull, not me). You can't argue that there are improvements that could be made, but what improvements, and when? Last Ewan presentation, along with help from Podnosh, pushed me well onto the path of utilising wonderful digital tools out there. My calendar is publicly available to view, I facebook, I've dappled second life and other stuff, my thoughts blogged, twitter not happened yet, but approaching inevitable experimentation. I'll have to say most of it has really helped with my organisation.

Digital tools available I use are effective because they reflect my 'real world' uses. You can experiment with bits and bobs, but ultimately the only way it will stick is if it really works for you - witness friends who are facebook dos and don'ts. Why should it all work for everyone?


Organising is the dull bit, but I'll do it if I have to. What I'm interested in developing is reflection. Reflection is easily neglected as we are too busy moving on, but if we develop this, then maybe we will see the reason to improve our organising, or maybe it will be something else. I want to be hyper reflective, not hyper organised. All indications are Ewan is indeed both - even if image of our Ewan Macintosh is surpringly eleventh in Google 'Ewan Macintosh' image popularilty, I'm sure he'll remain in top ten of digital guru pinups.