BeautyDialogues

Coping with Email

The always brilliant Beth Kanter posted about one of my own life issues in Beth's Blog - the challenge of coping with a significant amount of email input without becoming overwhelmed.

In it, she includes links to some excellent resources and articles - from Saturday's New York Times, and one early warning from Wired in 2004, offering the option of declaring "email bankruptcy".

I shared some of my own "slow work" solutions to the question in Beth's post's comments field, but/and I continue to be very curious about how other people manage. I want to learn more about this whole phenomenon, and how we are collectively holding it through the cultural changes we're going through, brought on by these relatively new communication technologies.

How about you? How are you coping with the increased demand/opportunities for connection and responsiveness that email brings? Is it even a problem for you?

How does this question appear when we look at it through a beauty-lens ... ?

Food

On my morning walks lately I've noticed more and more vegetables showing up amongst the flowers in my neighbors' gardens.

One neighbor, Grover, has been a leader in this movement for many many years with a whole front garden full of peas, tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, carrots, beans, squash, onions, potatoes, kale and chard in constant rotation throughout the year. But now his influence appears to be spreading.

Right across the street from him, folks have built raised beds in the narrow strip of ground between sidewalk and street and planted corn and tomatoes in them. And they're just one example of the front-yard vegetable gardens popping up all over the area.

Whether it's an instinctive response to the rising gas prices or the beginning of a zeitgeist shift back to basics, it feels real good to have food in the neighborhood.

My Friend Fletcher

My friend Fletcher (has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?) started blogging again after several months of hiatus (or neglect, take your pick); check out the new Fletcher's Blog. Fletcher's a digital artist with a keen eye for the bizarre and the wonderful and I think you'll enjoy his work, especially if you're partial to street photography and astute political commentary.

Here's one of my favorites from his Carnaval photo shoot:

Promoting Yourself

I seem to be on a real video kick lately. :-) Here's one that came though this morning from Berrett Koehler Publishers. They have a fantastic editor for their newsletter, Jeevan Sivasubramaniam, who always cracks me up. This video is a great example of his sense of humor used to illustrate a valuable lesson.

The video's about authors and promoting books, but the points are equally valid for anyone making a public offering in learning how (and how not) to promote yourselves:

Responses to What's Possible Now

I've received some great responses on Seesmic from my question about what's possible now that wasn't possible before as a result of this new communications technology, and I thought I'd share a few of them with you. They're all short - most of them around a minute - so enjoy!

The first is from Julie Gieseke from Map The Mind, who brings up several things that have been important to me about using this technology - the power of deepening connections, and the freedom it gives us introverts to be deliberate and thoughtful about our communications:

Next, Otir from New York talks about the way her own access to knowledge has been exponentially increased by the advances in these tools over the last ten years:

These next two are from software developer Clarence Westberg. In the 1st he talks about the incredible expansion of community this new technology brings, and in the 2nd he amends that statement by pointing out who is excluded from this brave new world:

Finally, media inspiration and video adventurer Howard Rheingold talks about the challenges and opportunities he sees opening before us now in using these tools:

A Question for You

I was playing with Seesmic this morning, and realized I could make a little video for you there. So I used it to ask a question ...

Design Deliberations

I was reading something in Chris Brogan's blog the other day on blog design, a solid informative post about basing each design decision on its congruence with your blog's intended use. At last count this piece had drawn 61(!) comments from his readers, many of them appreciative of Brogan's suggestion to use a thinner header to take full advantage of valuable page "real estate".

I  wrote a long comment myself, in part promoting the idea of a more expansive banner, because sometimes an image is as valuable (if not more so) as anything else you could say. This fact may not be immediately apparent in the largely left-brain logic of the marketplace, but it is no less true. Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind gives a wonderful exposition of why right-brain creativity is an increasingly important component in today's world.

One of the great things about a blog is how easy it is to change it, and I tend to be continually tweaking and fine-tuning my "look and feel" and sidebar content. This new banner, for example, is a radical departure from what I've done here in the past.

Even though it intuitively felt right, I must admit at first I was nervous about using black in the beauty dialogue color scheme, since I usually have a more literal focus on light. Then I saw these lines from Anam Cara, by John O'Donohue, and knew I was ok:

"We need a light that has retained its kinship with the darkness ... All creativity awakens at this pivotal threshold where light and darkness test and bless each other. You only discover balance in your life when you learn to trust the flow of this ancient rhythm."

The power of visual language is undeniable, perhaps because it speaks not only to our conscious, logical brain, but also to our unconscious, poetic intuition and imagination. Like Pink, I believe that gaining intuitive fluency is one of the most important skills you can develop, as a designer and as a human being.

But what do you think? What are some of the design decisions you have made and why did you make them? Where does your own balance lie between logic and intuition?

Visual Conversation

The one-dimensional language of text all alone on a page is a thing of the past - more and more our online communications are being enriched by images and audio, and video is everywhere.

I was taking a walk with the fabulous Howard Rheingold (what's a little name-dropping among friends? :-) last week along a wetland stream at the base of Mount Tamalpais, and as always I learned all kinds of wonderful new things from him. Here's one I can tell you about - Seesmic.

Seesmic is the ultimate Web2.0 communications vehicle. Linked into Twitter and YouTube (so far), Seesmic is a video-based conversational forum and social networking site. It was started by a charismatic Frenchman, Loic Le Meur, and people from all over the world have joined him there so the threaded video conversations are happening in several languages. It's still in alpha, but you can sign up for it and Loic will send you an invitation code.

Now that I've already dropped his name, let me talk about Howard for a moment. He is one of the coolest people I know - not just because he's famous (in my world at least) and has written lots of fabulous books, but because he is absolutely genuine, and because he's so curious that he knows an awful lot about everything and is totally willing to share what he knows. He's been doing lots of video himself lately, and recently launched his own video blog. His latest entry is a hilarious attempt to multi-task while making a video.

Annie

What stays with me from Annie Leibovitz' photographic exhibit (and the book it illustrates: A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005) is her decision to integrate her personal and professional photography into a seamless whole. As she says, "it is one life, not two".

Perhaps being married to Susan Sontag and having close personal ties with many famous people has helped blur her line between intimate and public, but I think it is more to do with the level of her gaze, that seems to see pretty much everything with the same measure. There were many stunning portraits among her collection, but the ones that stood out for me were the ones where it seemed her subjects met this gaze head-on. Here are Annie's photographs of Mark Morris, Eudora Welty and Sarah Cameron Leibovitz, to show you what I mean:

Slow Work

The other day a couple of friends and I were talking about the difficulties of maintaining a healthy life/work balance, which as you know dear reader has been one of my personal challenges. It was extraordinarily helpful to hear the details of other people's struggles with this increasingly prevalent  modern phenomenon, and draw on their solutions.

SlowWork, a concept with connections to the SlowFood movement, is another positive response to this cultural addiction to speed. It's not about going backwards or doing things "at a snail's pace", they say, but about changing gears and finding a way to work that's less driven and destructively focused on quanity rather than quality; giving ourselves the space to cultivate our professional relationships, the time for the rest and recuperation that's needed to support our physical and mental health so that we can do our best. In other words, bringing a different quality of presence to our work.

During my walk this morning I was listening to a podcast from Oprah's Book Club, where Eckhart Tolle was talking about opportunities to bring more mindfulness into our everyday work practices. He suggested two simple exercises. One, take something that occurs all the time; the phone rings, say, and instead of racing to pick it up, let it go for an extra ring or two. Take that time as a reminder to be present with this moment, and begin the call from that place.

Tolle's other suggestion was one of my own favorite "tricks" - keep something beautiful next to you on your desk - a flower, perhaps - and periodically look up from the computer screen to rest your gaze on it.

Another thing I do is to light a candle before phone calls with my clients. They might not even know I'm doing it, but it reminds me that the person I am speaking to is holy, a human being worthy of my utmost care and attention. For some clients, this is a ritual they partake in as well, and we start our calls with a moment's silence followed by a brief 'check-in' so that anything that would distract or effect our work together is spoken and shared openly. It also helps to create the intimacy and connection that feeds creative collaboration and produces extraordinary results.

Do you have practices to help you stay centered as you go about your work? What are they?