Step One: The Email Problem

I'm the girl who hates to go to bed because I might miss something. I also tend to subscribe to everything, because who knows where my next best idea ever might come from. But as a result, my in boxes, both personal and work, are stuffed with notifications about anything and everything. If it's a social media site, a newsletter, a specialty store, I'm getting email from them.

So today, as the first act of the new simply my life regime, I unsubscribed from almost everything. It's interesting -- I didn't have "Plunder" or "SOCMedia" in my life 2 years ago, and somehow managed to stagger along through life. I feel no distress at all as I unsub, unsub, unsub.

Tomorrow I will start deleting old emails, and along with that, old email folders. Hopefully this will mean that I will spend less time reading and deleting email in the future, and will begin to not find it necessary to obsessively check email even when I'm not working.

2011 New Year's Resolutions

Well, it's that time again -- time to evaluate my progress towards goals and chart my new course. 2010 was an interesting year. I experienced some turmoil in my private life, but was able to more or less maintain my equanimity.  I feel as good about that as I do any of my accomplishments. I set fewer professional goals for myself, and that helped me to focus more. So let's look at how I did.

 1. Review and re-define my personal brand. I'm feeling a little unfocused and unhappy with my direction right now and need to figure out where it is I want to be in the next 3 years.
The work that makes me happiest right now is the thinking and talking about innovation and managing creative teams. It seems to me that there isn't a lot of knowledge about transforming teams from ordinary to innovative. I think that I would like to work on that, and in doing so, refocus my brand.

2. Blog more regularly. I really enjoy this, even if (as I suspect!) it is just me and my nephew occasionally reading it. But blogging does help me focus my thoughts. I am going to try to blog weekly. The summers are the hardest time, when all I want to do is be out in my garden. But let's see if I can't be a little more regular with this.
I think I blogged here 50 times, out of a target 52. I also started a new blog for my personal musings, allowing this to become a more professionally focused space. I blogged there 44 times. So the combined effort is well above my goal. 

3. Continue to improve my ASL skills. I have 18 months to reach Intermediate level on the Sign Language Proficiency Interview. This isn't a minor goal, to say the least.
I haven't made my goal here yet, but I still have seven months. I feel like my signing has improved. My receptive skills definitely have.

4. Continue work on my Instructional Design Model for Teaching Deaf Adults. I would like to be able to present this at conferences in 2011.
I made very little to no direct progress on this goal. However, I do have a better understanding of the linguistic aspects of ASL and that is helping me further define my model.

Here are my goals for next year:

1. Using a methodology I describe here, perform an analysis of the skills and experience that I need to develop in order to determine what I need to do to maintain my position.

2. Learn to use InDesign and complete a project using it.

3. Work on understanding what I can do to maximize the creativity and innovation displayed by my team. Write an article or give a presentation on leading a creative team.

4. Develop an idea for a mobile device app that I recently came up with.

5. Investigate moving this blog to WordPress that I host myself.

What are your resolutions?

Here's hoping that 2011 is your happiest ever!

Major Themes for 2011

My boss has asked me to develop a strategic plan for my department at NTID. This has been a very interesting exercise. It has given me an opportunity to talk to people inside and outside about where should we be in three years and what do we need to do to be ready to go there. These conversations have been so enlightening!

I came to this task with an understanding that technology is progressively becoming more mobile and distributed. And that this will have a democratizing effect on the population.

My conversations with my colleagues have led me to see how important the idea of entrepreneurship is going to be to us. You may not immediately connect entrepreneurship to University. Understanding the fundamentals of product management is going to be important to my team, as we strive to support faculty and staff entrepreneurs. I will be exploring that connection in future blog postings.

Design-thinking is another new idea I will be exploring. What I like about design-thinking is that it includes empathy as well as rationality and creativity, and is a method for making innovation happen. Up to now I haven't had language or process to describe how I innovate, so my attempts at supporting innovation in my team have been less than universally successful. In a nutshell, if the person I was working with was an innovator, then mostly I just had to get out of the way. I want to do more than that. Hopefully, learning and implementing design-thinking will make that possible. Expect to read more about that in the future.

I am looking forward to 2011, and the learning and exploration that is going to come with it!

Conformity or Out of the Frying Pan into a Slightly Smaller Frying Pan

I found this clip on YouTube. Take a few minutes and watch it. Then come back and let's talk.

(My apologies that this isn't captioned. Not everything on YouTube is yet.)





I don't remember how I came accross this video, but it raises some interesting questions for me:

1. In what ways is your conformity to your group resulting in the loss of your authentic self?
2. If we must have creative and original ideas/products/processes to survive/make money/keep the business going how are we achieving originality when everyone may be conforming?
3. Thinking is good but doing is better. What behaviors have you not changed that are keeping you from being happy. Why haven't you changed?

Turning a Corner

One of my goals for 2010 is to continue to develop my ASL competency. I have to attain a level of "Intermediate" by July 2010. I just got the results back from my lasted evaluation and I am at "Survival Plus" which is the step right below Intermediate. So I have move thru five levels since I started studying two years ago.

And that is very wonderful. But I had two things happen this week that help me to understand that I really am getting better at this. First, a kid who has been working for our department for six months came in to tell me that he was leaving, that he appreciated the opportunity to work in the department and he is moving to Washington DC to take a job at a company that a friend of his has started. And he said all that in ASL and he said it only once AND I understood it! And I didn't have that minute of panic and "oh no, he's signing to me!" feeling -- I just understood him!

Second: I have been looking at youtube videos of jokes told in ASL. Up until today, I couldn't understand anything, but today, I got the joke! Whoo hooooo! Here's the link if you are interested in it!

I tell people all the time that if you keep working on something, if you don't give up, that you will get better and better. It sure feels good to see the evidence in my own life!

2010 Resolutions

Happy 2010, everyone! It is shocking how quickly 2009 zoomed by, and it is time for my annual resolutions.

First let's review how I did on last year's resolutions.

Here they are:

1. Work on Brand Clare. Well, I did do this in a limited way. But I now realize that I need to redefine what this is. That will be one of my resolutions for 2010.
2. Upgrade my resume using an online resume site called Visual CV. Nope. Didn't even start. See resolution #1.
3. Learn how to use Adobe InDesign and Dreamweaver. My strategy for accomplishing this was to do it at work. But changes I made in my team's operations made it impossible for me to do much more than hang on there. I don't anticipate I will have much time for more than leading my team this year either.
4. Master enough ASL that I can start taking classes at RIT. I took classes 4 times a week every quarter, had a tutor twice a week, and attended a week long residential program at Camp Mark 7. I feel like I have enough vocabulary to more or less communicate, and I have been able to have meetings with my Deaf teammates without an interpreter. After the holidays, I will attempt to attend Department Chairs meetings with no interpreter. If folks are signing directly to me, slowly, I can usually figure out what they are telling me. This is not mastery by any one's definition of course. But I do feel like I have made some progress here, and I hope that by next Fall I will be able to enroll in another class. Maybe by then I will have figured out what it is I want to study!
5. Finally get my home network setup the way I want. We made some serious strides in the right direction here. This morning I can listen to music streamed from our collection, or the Internet, watch movies streamed via Netflicks, and print. My server crashed one day when Joanne accepted Microsoft updates for it, not realizing that I had earlier crashed it doing the same thing and had vowed never to accept updates without careful research again. But maybe we don't need a server to do what I want. I'm researching other options now.

And these were a couple of "maybes"

6. Buy a mandolin and learn to play it. Nope, not this year.

7. Buy an DSL camera. Yes, I bought a Canon 5D Mark II. Here is a review of it on Ken Rockwell's wonderful site. I have had a wonderful time with this fantastic camera. It is probably the most expensive thing I have ever bought, other than a car, and definitely the thing I have most enjoyed. Joanne and I are planning a trip to Africa for later this year and I am very excited about what I will be able to shoot. My Flickr stream is here if you want to take a look at what I have done so far.

Now on to 2010 Resolutions:

It's obvious to me that I took on more than I could accomplish so I am cutting back a little this year.

1. Review and re-define my personal brand. I'm feeling a little unfocused and unhappy with my direction right now and need to figure out where it is I want to be in the next 3 years.

2. Blog more regularly. I really enjoy this, even if (as I suspect!) it is just me and my nephew occasionally reading it. But blogging does help me focus my thoughts. I am going to try to blog weekly. The summers are the hardest time, when all I want to do is be out in my garden. But let's see if I can't be a little more regular with this.

3. Continue to improve my ASL skills. I have 18 months to reach Intermediate level on the Sign Language Proficiency Interview. This isn't a minor goal, to say the least.

4. Continue work on my Instructional Design Model for Teaching Deaf Adults. I would like to be able to present this at conferences in 2011.

2009 New Years Resolutions

I actually do make New Year's resolutions and I actually follow through and do them. In past years I have had resolutions like

• To clean one storage area (closet, drawers) a week
• To have more fun (when I realized I didn't know what fun *was* anymore!)
• To improve my photography
• To learn to play the Uke
• To improve brand Clare.

That was my last year's resolution - to improve brand Clare. I feel like I have worked my whole life to improve someone else's brand, and done a pretty good job at it. So last year I decided I should put the same attention on my personal brand.

I thought the idea of a "personal brand" was pretty novel and ground-breaking. Well, It's not! Just Google "personal branding" and see take a look at the zillion hits you will get back. There is a ton out there, for sure.

So how did I do on improving Brand Clare? Not bad. If you Google my name, you will see that I am most of the hits for the first three pages. And there are no "bad" hits -- pages that I would rather not be associated with.

This year, I am going to take Brand Clare a little further and see If I can become associated with a particular message. One of the sites I reviewed on branding suggested that a clear message is essential. So what message do I want to be associated with? Clare Dygert is an expert at leading innovative, creative teams. I think I am good with teams, and that the mashup of methods I use are interesting and novel. I will use this blog as a way to refine my thinking and talking about them.

Other resolutions for 2009:

• Upgrade my resume using an online resume site called Visual CV. You should check this out - these people really have something going on here. It sor of reminds me of something from back in the pre-www days called Hyperstudio. Do you remember that? (You will see from the link that Hyperstudio is alive and well.) It will probaby take me a year to build the collaterals I need for a Visual CV, but I am excited about doing it.

• Learn how to use Adobe InDesign and Dreamweaver. This will be helpful developing collaterals for the virtual resume.

• Master enough ASL that I can start taking classes at RIT. I am working at RIT now and as part of my benefits package I can take courses. But I have to be a certian level of fluency with ASL by July 2010 to keep my job. i want to make significant progress this year, and have decided that until I do I will have to put off other classes.

• Finally get my home network setup the way I want. Last year we bough a HP Homeserver, and I have used it to do a few things-- manage our printing, backup our computers, store photos and music. But I haven't done what I wanted to do from the start: Use the server to broadcast music all over the house and to store and stream Netflix movies to our TV. I have a new Onkyo receiver now, and I think we are dangerously close to getting this set up.

And two maybe resolutions:

• Buy a mandolin and learn to play it. I am really attracted to the Gibson F series mandolins. Here's a link to one of them here.

• Buy an DSL camera. Right now I have a very nice point and shoot -- an Olympus 550uz. You can read a review of it here. It has a fantastic zoom, and shake control, and I have shot some really great pictures with it. But I want to do a little more than I can do with my Olympus.