For the first time in a very long time, I opened my MacBook, navigated to TextEdit and had a complete blank stare on my face when confronted with what I could possibly write. What do I write? All morning, there have been thoughts entering my head. I thought about my week in India spending much of my day with Muslims and how it feels to return to America and hear that they were my enemy. I thought about reviewers of the Apple iPad 2 and how can someone possibly have the capability to review a device while still write it for the casual user? My point is, to understand everything the iPad can do and how it works would require a technical background and computer saviness but, that would also mean that your writing style and wordage is far understandable by any casual iPad buyer. Us geeks know if we’re going to buy it or not but I’m curious is average Joes can read TechCrunch and decide if the iPad is right for them based on that review? Probably not. Then, I thought about possibly doing a post on why I’m selling the Lumix DMC-LX5 and reverting back to the Canon S95 but I’m not going to write that until the Lumix is actually on eBay or on its way back to Amazon. Finally, I thought about the fact that March is my 7th month in New Hampshire and maybe I had a few thoughts on that?
This is a typical day for me. Among photography, tweets, blogging and over-sharing, I still have so many posts that hit me in the head that I’ll never ever write mostly because I have an actual job that requires a lot of me. It’s always amazing to me and my friends that I manage to accomplish so much in a day and still cook meals every night and travel and call my parents.
Maybe this post will be about ‘lately’ and what’s been going on. I do talk a lot about myself but, it’s my blog and that’s how this sort of thing works but, as I said back in January in my “life update”, I rarely talk about day to day. It’s usually thoughts or a story or some specific experience paired with a few photos.
Recently, a friend observed how my sharing has changed. I’ve gone from very detailed stories on what I’m up to at work to a check in from time to time that I’m at work or that it was a good day. It would seem that I’ve finally completely disconnected “work adam” and “social adam” and this is surprisingly not scary in the least. The fact that everyone knew what I was doing for Yoono or Brightkite or clients with detailed examples of how I learned something today at work was neither good or bad. It fit in the startup lifestyle but doesn’t work in the corporate environment. The funny thing is, no one at TomTom has asked me to stop tweeting or blogging. I just worked this out on my own. Maybe it’s because for the first time ever, I feel that what I’m doing has a huge value to me and the future of this company. Maybe sharing something defeats the purpose of why I went through the experience to begin with. I’m a smarter person because of my job and selfishly want to keep that experience to myself.
Actually, the reason has escaped me. It just seems that everything work related never ever makes its way to my online life. I check in to work at TomTom sometimes but not all times and I may post a photo from an event we have or a trip for work but never do I vent or talk about an experience. Heck, no one even knows what I do at TomTom outside of close friends and family. T’hat blog post I wrote back in August about my job is completely invalid now. I’m doing something I never even knew I’d be capable of doing and it’s very challenging but extremely rewarding. Another truth is that there hasn’t been a single day where I’ve had a bad day. I’ve only been at the company since September but every day is fantastic and exciting. I’m being pushed very hard to accomplish a lot and, almost all of my work is never going to be something the public ever sees. isn’t that a stark change from where I was a year ago? Before, everything I touched was public and I embraced the attention. Now, I drill away for 10 hours a day, fly all over the world and live in Powerpoint and Excel and no one outside of the company will see directly what I worked on. They’ll experience it but my name isn’t attached to it.
This is a completely new thing for me.
In fact, I feel like I’ve said way too much just by sharing what I did. I don’t have a fear of being fired, just in getting too caught up in the output and the “polish” and not on the fundamental effectiveness of what I’m working on. There’s a huge difference. For years, my image came 1st and the key effectiveness of what I got done was secondary and now that has shifted.
One thing that I can say for any employers out there is that my level of productivity after shifting the time and style of sharing I do on social media hasn’t changed. I admit that I share on Twitter as easily as I sneeze and cover my mouth. Sharing is absolutely 2nd nature and, it’s the fact that the iPhone doesn’t have a physical keyboard that keeps me from doing it in my sleep. I figured I’d have this super huge amount of free time after reducing my tweets and how often I share what I’m doing but that hasn’t been the case. Some people that use Twitter & Facebook do suffer from a loss of productivity. I didn’t just for the record. Also, my style isn’t to read. I don’t read Twitter streams or Facebook updates. I never did. I selfishly would throw my line in the water and get bites all day instead of watching other people fishing. If you are a receiver and not a broadcaster, closing Tweetdeck during business hours may help you. I don’t know.
I’m sitting in a cafe facing the runway at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport. A man with a huge Inspiron is watching me write this on the tiny MacBook Air and it looks like, prior to ever publishing this post, I already have 1 reader. I hope he decides to share it on Twitter :)