Fighting the Daily Fire

I just took a long weekend and it was amazing, just what the doctor ordered. I read a great book, got outside of my comfort zone and relaxed. I took Friday off. This morning I have over 100 emails in my inbox from the weekend. I had been wondering why I felt so tense and this is the reason. I estimate I actually needed to receive c.20 of those emails and the rest were irrelevant or could have been dealt with by a phone call/use of initiative.

This brings me to a bigger issue. It is very difficult to balance the time one spends working on the business dealing with 'right now' concerns with the time spent working on forward planning and making sure the business actually moves in the direction I want it to go. I read an excellent book on the plane this weekend called, "Millionaire Upgrade" by Richard Parkes Cordock which despite its abysmal title and inherent cheesiness nonetheless had some good key points to make. For example, like the importance of setting big goals and plans to achieve them.

I used to be very good at this. I remember my grandmother laughing when I said I wanted to go to Cambridge University when I was about 11 and me sitting down and trying to figure out how I was going to get there. So this week, I'm going to work hard to balance the immediate fire-fighting with the big picture.

How to use LinkedIn

I like LinkedIn. I used to be very cynical about it - I supposed it to be just another means of showing off how many aquaintances one has. I always felt that those who had to demonstrably make a point of mentioning who they knew usually did so spurred by a sense of shortcoming (ahem, see facebook).

But actually, LinkedIn has proved me wrong because it is genuinely about sharing contacts rather than showboating. It is the inverse of the above, it is saying here is my little black book, feel free to use it if it helps. Or at least, it ought to be.

Three other reasons I like it:

• I got offered work through it last week. A friend of a friend was trying to solve a problem and via LinkedIn I became aware of that opportunity.
• The Answers thing works. Think of all the clever stuff your colleagues know, all the latent knowledge just sitting there. Well, this brings it to the surface. I used this today to get a recommendation on good ways to learn PHP. Saved me hours of looking at the wrong tutorials or reading Amazon reviews I don't necessarily trust.
  
• You can see what people are up to/into in tech via the questions being asked.
• When you're set to meet someone new you can see who you both mutually know beforehand
  

So there we go, rock on LinkedIn. You have at least one fan in Cambridge, UK.