Megan Leigh McDonald

Last night I attended a French conversation group to get some practice and build some confidence in my speaking abilities. It’s interesting what came out of that for me and how that applies to my normal 9 to 5. Upon reflection afterward and during my long bike ride through the rain back home, I realized that learning another language builds some very important skills.

For example, it challenges one to think on one’s feet. There were a lot of people with different levels of knowledge. Choosing partners to talk with was somewhat challenging in that regard. On top of who looked interesting, I also wanted to choose someone who was at or around the same level as myself, but who would provide a slight challenge. For awhile I spoke to two very lovely ladies, a teacher/artist and an architect. We chatted away half the evening, talking about art and Paris.

Later in the evening, I found myself in a group with the ‘organitrice’ and some actual French people. I was a little surprised that French people would attend, but pleasantly so. At any rate, I found myself needing to strategize the way I phrased my thoughts in order to communicate clearly. Not having as many nouns and verbs in my repetoire meant that I needed to think creatively in order to describe at least the concept of what I was trying to say. I found that the more experienced speakers were more than happy to translate my attempts by reflecting back to me a better way to say it.

I have to say, I left feeling, well a little smarter and a little more practiced. If you’re at all interested in joining this group, here’s the information.

Even when working under the ‘Waterfall’ methodology, I always make it a point to keep a ‘task board’ at my desk or nearby. It’s something I borrowed from Scrum but it works so well for my own personal workload.  Usually it’s just a bunch of index cards and maybe a stark black and white printout of headings for one of three or four columns…not started, currently working on and finished. But about 8 months ago, I got fancy and created my own task headings/cards in Illustrator.

Since a lot of people who have seen the cards have asked for copies of the files, I decided to post the template here. It’s got a loose color-code schema (I could easily see the red for ‘to-do’ instead of ‘done’) and there are separate headings as well as a handful of usefully named cards. And if you’re an Illustrator afficianado then you can edit them and use them as you wish.

• - Task Board Headings
• - Task Cards 1
• - Task Cards 2

Have fun! Work is hard, but the details should always be fun…Mouseover

So when this really cool, knowledgeable Product Manager started, she got me re-interested in Twitter. It’s a simple social tool, really. It is basically a thread of random thoughts that tile down your page. Entwined in it are the random thoughts posted by any of the ‘friends’ that you ‘follow’.  It seemed cute and kind of superficial at first. But then it grew on me. I set my account to send text messages to my phone when anyone on my friends list posted to twitter.

Suddenly, I could see through the lonely moments of a friend who just moved here to the West Coast. And I could see the daily musings of my boss.  I caught up on the workouts, sunsets and random sighs that people in LA so often spend alone. It was a way to capture those comfortable almost-silent moments when stream-of-consciousness and chemistry bind two people together in an even tighter weave.

I was just starting to appreciate that when the Malibu fires gave me another new reason to appreciate twitter.  Sunday morning was full of smoke with fires on 3 sides of my apartment building (all within a mile of it). The electric was out which meant the television, radio and internet were all down.  And on top of that, cell phone service was shut down in the area to allow the firefighters and police to communicate. But…my text messaging worked. I was able to send texts to family and friends while I packed my most valuable items and drove away to Santa Monica. But I don’t have a lot of my coworkers phone #s. Not everyone at work feels comfortable dancing across that line between personal and professional.

I did however, have Twitter and since I’d set it up for phone, I texted to the site and was able to keep people at work posted that way. They were concerned about me and other friends in Malibu and wanted to know how things were. I was able to communicate to the website. It made me think about emergencies and the last one I was in, 9-11. After 9-11, the company I worked for, Reuters, handed out little cards with emergency call numbers. In the event of another emergency, we were to call into the central number so that Reuters would be able to inform our families of our safety. Interesting though, on 9-11 most peoples’ cells didn’t work either. However, text messaging to a central service set up like Twitter would work very well.

Anyways, most people think about social tools and networks in this very hipster-fresh ‘MySpace’ way that often seems quite frivilous.  But I believe the word ’social’ to have a greater depth than whom is snogging whom or what Saturday’s game was like. I believe ’social’ encompasses all the ways that we communicate and share our lives, from fun to emergency. Social tools have the capacity to change lives, to affect people positively as well as negatively.

Watch out for Twitter, I think it has a great deal of potential.