I’m in Toronto for a lightning trip, speaking tomorrow at a luncheon hosted by Women in Film & Television. Tonight I’m staying at the Sutton Place Hotel, which puts me at the epicentre of memory for my first 25 years of life. From the east-facing window of my suite I look down the barrel of Wellesley Street, which ends in the park that my childhood home adjoined. From the south-facing window I see the Ontario government office block where Rob worked when we first met, long before we got married. If I craned my head out to look west, I’d be looking at the blocks leading to my high school and all the tortured memories that are now locked away within its walls. And if I could look almost due north, I could see the former location of the ice cream cone where Rob and I ate the day we first had lunch together, across from the museum where we were later married.

The geography of memory is powerful and inescapable. There’s no way for me to sit at the corner of Wellesley and Bay Street without feeling utterly overwhelmed by the cumulative personal history that lies within these few square kilometres. At age 40, those memories bring a shocking and somewhat painful awareness of how far distant these memories mostly lie, both in years and in emotional immediacy; the very fact that they no longer hold the same heat or clarity is a reminder of how long ago these events took place. With that tangible connection to the passing of time comes the brutal, blessed awareness of what it means to make each day count, and to use well the years that lie ahead.

If walking down a once-familiar street can discipline us in the art of living fully, what happens when our memories no longer lie in streets to which we can return? Geek though I be, my memories are mostly embedded in the physical spaces that presently surround me: my childhood home (where I used my first computer); the Queen’s Park legislature (where I met my husband on the online chat network); the local pub (where a group of us convened the meeting that established Canada’s first online political network).

As our world and culture move online, it will be the digital experiences that take the foreground, and the geographic locations that fade to the back. Do you remember where you sat when you first logged onto Facebook — and would you be nostalgic to return to that same desk? Do you remember where you were when you wrote you first tweet? Which computer you were using the day you met your digital BFF?

Our digital spaces might themselves hold the same evocative power as the geographic spaces to which we now attach, but unlike physical locations, we are much less likely to revisit them. Have you used the Internet Archive to visit your old Geocities page and enjoy a whiff of nostalgia? Looked for a screen capture of the AOL login screen? Listened to a recording of the sound your 2400-baud modem made as it established its tentative connection to the net?

While our digital lives are much easier to preserve and much harder to erase than the specifics of any given cityscape, we are far less likely to discover emotional resonance through the happenstance of wandering onto the digital terrain of our youth. A website, once razed, no longer has a location to which you can feel attachment; nobody notices that the URL they are visiting represents an I.P. address that used to belong to their favorite blog. Online, what’s gone is gone, and even what remains — technically — may be just as invisible if we never visit, and it never pops up in search results.

What anchors can we create, I wonder, to provide some emotional endurance to our most meaningful digital moments? Perhaps Facebook’s Timeline is a start, giving you a way to wander down your digital memory lane and remember the funny site you once liked or shared.

But the emotional memories that have the power to shock us into recognizing the passage of time — to recognize how brief and precious today really is — are not the memories that we carefully curate. They are the memories we stumble across, or stumble into, someplace as impermanent as a one-night hotel room.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

Today I was catching up with my colleague Haig Armen when he asked me if I knew Steve Andersen.

“You mean, Steve Andersen from Salesforce?” I asked.

["You mean, Steve Anderson of Open Media?" my husband asked later.]

“No, Steve Anderson of Get Mental Notes,” Haig replied.

“See, this is why it’s better to be named Haig Armen,” I pointed out.

“Not when you’re 15.”

Haig’s point is well-taken. When you’re 15, it sucks to have a funky name. It sucks to be distinctive. It really sucks to be unique.

But S.E.O. is the ultimate payback for all the teen freaks. Not  (just) those who are reincarnated as dot-com millionaires, but all those with freaky interests that let us rule a corner of the blogosphere, freaky aesthetics that let us rule on Etsy or Flickr, or freaky names that guarantee that when someone googles your name, they actually find you.

So, teen freaks of the world: it gets better. You may want to blend in today. But tomorrow, when you’re ready to stand out, Google will reward you.

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I’m not really a Lent kinda gal. (It may have something to do with me being Jewish.) But for the past few years, I’ve felt increasingly Lent-aware, because of the sheer number of people who now seem to give up Facebook for Lent (but then tweet about it), email for Lent (but then blog about it) or even the entire Internet for Lent (but then double-up on their online postings the moment they’ve bitten the ears off a chocolate bunny.)

If you’re giving up the Internet (or some part of it) for Lent because you think it will be good for you to unplug, I hope you’ll read the piece I wrote for The Atlantic last week on smarter alternatives to unplugging.

If you’re giving up the Internet for Lent because you think it will suck to unplug, and the suffering is the point (I am getting the general gist of Lent correct here, aren’t I?) then go for it: suffer to your heart’s delight! But just please please don’t make the rest of us happily plugged-in, Lent-free folks suffer with you. Some guidelines for your Lenten digital fast:

1. Don’t tweet, blog, Facebook, YouTube or otherwise chronicle how offline you are. That is totally cheating.
2. Keep all your other screen time constant. If you replace your five daily hours of World of Warcraft with five hours watching action movies, you are missing out on the opportunity to actually learn something from this experience.
3. Your profound revelations about the true nature of digital life, which are only apparent to you now that you are spending the hour between 6-7 a.m. offline every day for forty entire days OMG!!! are not going to impress those of us who still remember the value of an always-on iPhone. We don’t want to hear about your new digital enlightenment over coffee or while we are in line with you at the ATM.
4. When you come back online after 40 days, please do not forward us the adorable photo of the cat that got stuck in the dryer with a teddy bear, LOL! We all saw that picture on about nine different people’s Facebook walls in the eternity that you went offline.
5. Remember: just because you’re giving it up for 40 days doesn’t mean it isn’t a useful part of your life for the other 325.

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Last night I was delighted to participate in a panel hosted by Canadian Women in Communications, speaking alongside Rebecca Bollwitt (aka Miss 604) and Gillian Shaw of the Vancouver Sun. CWC President Stephanie MacKendrick did a terrific job of eliciting our respective stories on how we got into social media, and really homed in on the question of how we were each inspired to make careers in the digital realm.

One of the questions that came up in the ensuing discussion was how we each maintain balance between our on- and offline lives, or between work and personal life. Did any of us have personal mantras that helped us stay grounded?

I shared the mantra that’s helped keep our house sane(r) for the past 8 years: O.M.F.T.  We discovered O.M.F.T. when our daughter was 6 months old, and I was trying to finish my dissertation, and we only had child care about 15 hours a week, and Rob went on the road for six weeks to serve as Jack Layton’s speechwriter during the 2004 election campaign. I was beyond stressed out, and as I found myself sitting in the garage one afternoon drinking an emergency glass of wine (I’d already gone through all the wine in the house, but had some kosher-for-Passover wine stashed away), I had to admit that we were trying to live and work beyond our actual capacity. Thus was born our acronym for clearly declaring a personal or professional commitment out-of-scope: if it was just One More Fucking Thing, O.M.F.T.

You know a commitment is O.M.F.T. if you’ve had a cold for two weeks, have a kid home sick with strep, and are behind on five crucial, looming deadlines. (This is just hypothetical, of course.) At that point, anything that isn’t related to meeting one of those deadlines, or keeping you and your family alive, has to be designated O.M.F.T.  Say no to it, or if it’s already on your plate, take it off.

O.M.F.T. can help you keep your online life in order, too. Are you already running too hard, just keeping your Twitter feed, blog and Facebook profile alive? Well, maybe Google+ is O.M.F.T.  Do you have 45 unanswered client e-mails? Well, maybe the RFP that just landed in your inbox is O.M.F.P., and you don’t actually have to submit a proposal…you’ve got plenty of work already.  Is your iPhone refusing to sync with your computer? Well, maybe fixing it is just O.M.F.T. and for now, you’re going to have to live un-synced.

The truth is that if you live online, you don’t have One More Fucking Thing — you probably have dozens. The Internet generates a constant stream of demands for your attention, input and work. The only way to keep from being totally overwhelmed by those demands is to develop a reflexive way of separating out what’s essential from what’s optional, and to recognize whenever you’re in a moment of stress or activity that necessarily limits you to only the essentials.

O.M.F.T. is the tool that works for me. Start asking yourself whether the latest demand to hit your inbox is O.M.F.T., and it could work for you too.

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Today’s practice: Focus on quality, not quantity.

Today’s tweets are full of references to New Year’s resolutions: “Tweet more”. “Tweet less”. “Blog more”. “Blog less.” “Check Facebook no more than once a day.” “Check Facebook at least once a day.”

You get the idea.

Like at least one other notable aspect of human intercourse, social media conversation has become preoccupied by how much. How much is too little? How much is too much? How much is just right?

Here’s one case where we should listen to the conventional wisdom: it’s not how much, it’s how you use it.

So this year, let go of your expectations for how much. Let go of your fears about enough. Let go of your fantasy that you’re going to offer more than the next guy.

And instead, focus on using what you’ve got. Give us one perfect tweet, every day. Post to YouTube just once this year, if that’s the one brilliant video you capture with your phone. Blog five times in a week, and then go dark until you’ve got fresh inspiration a month or two later.

Even if you’re strategic and consistent about posting regularly on 5 different social media platforms, give yourself one where you can let go of how much, and focus purely on quality. Having one social network where you’re freed from worrying about “how much” may be the key to discovering a new depth of thought, quality and sincerity in what you post. And if all if does is shift your preoccupation with how much, well, that will be enough.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

Today’s practice: Listen carefully to the slightest twinge of discomfort about how you’re interacting online. It’s there to help you learn to follow your own principles online.

Noise to Signal Cartoon
Whoever said “it’s better to give than to receive” had to be talking about advice. Giving it is fun: it makes you feel wise, generous and smug, all at the same time. Getting it, and especially following it, is a lot harder.

That’s what struck me as I struggled yesterday to adhere to the very principles I laid out in the Social Sanity Manifesto for HBR. Here’s the one I found toughest yesterday:

I will not judge others based on their online metrics. I’ll reply to emails and mentions based on my interest and availability, not the Klout score or follower count of the person who is writing to me.

True confession time: engaging with HBR readers is probably the number one contributor to metrics abuse in my own online life. My HBR posts are typically retweeted a few hundred times, sometimes into the thousands. That’s more than I can reply to, so I have to choose which tweets or comments will get a reply.

One of the factors that’s guided my replies is the desire to help people connect my posts to my username. The vast majority of tweets about my HBR post link to HBR, or mention @harvardbiz, without mentioning me as @awsamuel. I always hope that more people will connect the dots, and start following me back. That leaves me skating awfully close to point 3, “I will not game online metrics”.

Up until yesterday, I relied on various sketchy measures of influence in order to focus my attention and replies. I usually set up a HootSuite column searching on keywords I imagine will be tweeted in links to my HBR post, and though it pains me to admit this, I’ve often filtered that column by Klout so that I see just the Klout-ing-est tweets and reply to those. And I also use Topsy.com to see everyone who is tweeting a link to my latest HBR post, but check the “show influential only” box so that I can just focus on replying to people who are Very Important Social Media Users.

Yesterday, I foreswore these practices. It was a bit anxiety-producing, because these tactics have helped me ensure I thank people who have lots of followers. If I don’t thank them, then how will they know to follow me, tweet my every word, and add their millions of followers to my own?

Here’s the other truth. As you may have noticed, I don’t actually have millions of followers. All this busy influence-filtering has perhaps had some impact over the past couple of years, but it hasn’t been earth-shattering.

But it has been soul-shattering. Every time I’ve used these influence-filtering techniques, I’ve felt a bit icky. Every time I’ve demonstrated these influence-filtering techniques, I’ve felt ickier. And when I recently taught these techniques to a roomful of students, I felt downright corrupt. Was this really how I wanted to teach people to use the Internet?

No, it’s not. And if it’s not good enough to teach, it’s not good enough to do.

So here I am, trying something different. I’m still thanking people who tweeted my post, but I’m thanking the people who did mention me, rather than focusing on those who didn’t. I’m thanking some of the latter, too, but I’m picking out the most interesting or thoughtful tweets rather than allocating my attention based on the metrics-based “value” of the tweeter.

As a result, I had an energizing day of conversation. I got to think about what people were saying, instead of focusing on the numbers. I had a few actual back-and-forth exchanges with people, and I started following a few new people myself. I started a new list of people who were interested in this post, and who I hope will a source of further conversations ahead.

The lesson, in all this, is about more than judging people by the content of the tweets rather than the number of their Klout. It’s about listening to that inner ick, whenever it appears; about paying attention to the inner voice that tells us we’re transgressing some fundamental human principle in our interactions online.

We’re all babies, here, learning how to live online. Our digital moral compass is still calibrating, and the inner voice of conscience often whispers when we need it to shout. So get really, really quiet and listen, because it may be telling you something very important about who to spend time with online, and how to treat them.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

Today’s practice:  Practice your listening skills by choosing one social network where you’ll pay active attention, but not actually contribute.

My friend Jason Mogus likes to say that we teach what we need to learn. I have long taken this as the single best explanation for my career of hectoring people to listen using social media, because as anyone who has met me could tell you, I much prefer talking to listening.

This weakness for turning any medium into an output device makes each emergent social network a fresh challenge. How will I squeeze another 1000 words a week out of my brain, let alone another 3 hours out of my schedule? With Google+, I’ve been stymied: I’m already putting my professional updates onto Twitter, my personal updates onto Facebook, my reviews onto Yelp, my favorite images onto Pinterest, and my how-tos and insights onto my blogs. What else could I possibly have to say?

Nothing at all, perhaps. And maybe that’s a good thing.

With all the pressure to build brand, reputation and presence on each social network, there’s a tendency to see each new community as another place to stake a claim and find a voice. But it’s a Ponzi scheme of attention: with so many people speaking, who’s left to listen?

After a few forays into finding my voice on Google+, I’ve decided to look for my ears instead. I’m embracing this new platform as a chance to practice my listening; to appreciate what others are contributing, free from the anxiety of wondering whether my contributions are equally insightful or influential. One of the first things I noticed is how much of my stream is taken up by the same social media voices I follow in many other online contexts, so my focus on listening has pushed me towards broadening my attention and looking for new voices that can bring my attention to issues, people and perspectives I’m missing.

I know myself well enough to anticipate that once I’ve found my groove as a listener on Google+, I’ll eventually succumb to the urge to speak up, too. But committed, attentive and quiet listening is the ideal starting point for anyone who wants to find their voice in a new online context, so the decision to go silent for now makes sense even if I won’t be silent forever.

And by the time I’m ready to jump back into the Google+ conversation, there will inevitably be a new social network to try. I wonder what I’ll learn by listening there.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

Today’s practice: When you find an online comment or contribution that truly annoys you, put it on your desktop or bulletin board. It’s your own personal classroom for learning about difference, and practicing tolerance.

When companies, organizations or individuals set up their first social web presences, one of the things they often worry about is how to handle online criticism. In most cases, the now-recognized best practice is to err on the side of tolerance, accepting that some level of online criticism is part of life, and that the most effective and credible responses often come not from the community manager, but from the community itself.

That takes care of things as far as community managers are concerned, but what about social media users? I often hear from regular people (i.e., folks who are not communications or web professionals) who struggle with online criticism, too. The hostility of many online conversations feel inhibiting, a point that Frances Bula emphasized during our recent social media panel at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism. News and political sites, in particular, have become infamous for the inflammatory tone of their comment threads. And who feels energized by reading or participating in a social web site that is full of ad hominem attacks, profanity or garden-variety stupidity?

But I was reminded this week that one man’s garbage is another man’s treasure, when one of my favorite user-generated conversations was wiped clean. In this case, the conversation wasn’t online: it was on the walls of the ladies’ room just down the hall from my office.

As I have previously blogged, the quality of this bathroom graffiti has been one of the great delights of working at an art university. Many of its most inspired images and phrases have made it into my Twitter feed over the past few years, as you can see on the delightful gallery that got automagically curated by Twylah.

Before

After

Many, but not all. When a visiting conference and an accompanying fresh coat of paint took hold in our building this week, we lost treasures like “Whatever turns me on, I put up my nose” (accompanied by a pretty remarkable drawing of a person with a penis up her nose) and “You are beautiful and perfect just the way you are” (which I’d been planning to transplant to my gym, where the message is much-needed).

The penis-filled nose, in particular, was cited by one of my colleagues as a drawing we were better off without. And I get it: that image was a lot to take, especially if you’re just trying to nip out for quick mid-meeting pee.

But it’s the moments when we are confronted by something outside our comfort zone — by something ugly, transgressive or simply rude — that often produce the greatest growth. The obscene image, the idiotic blog comment, the hostile post on a Facebook wall: they get under our skin. They irritate us until we find a way to understand why somebody would write that, until we grapple with the painful reality that people are profoundly different from one another, until we grow a thicker skin.

So the next time you find yourself wishing that a website moderator would exert firmer control over a web space or presence, look more closely at the comment or contribution that is irritating you the most. Bookmark it, reread it, turn it into your desktop picture, mull over and ruminate on it. Make the most annoying parts of the social web into the parts that you know most intimately, and silently thank the Internet’s most egregious trolls for delivering a lesson in comprehending human difference.

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A rough day: we all have them. Yet no day is so rough that it should shake your faith in the Internet as, if not a universal cure, than a widely applicable balm. Here are 5 ways the Internet can cheer you up when you’re blue:

1. Create something. Upload a picture. Edit and share a video. Write a heartfelt blog post. Creativity is enormously healing, so make sure you have at least one established, accessible outlet for your creativity.
2. Listen to good advice.  Lots of sites are on standby, ready to offer you resources like 25 ways to improve your mood. If that doesn’t help, try 39 ways to boost your mood.
3. Resist temptation. Some online activities that usually feel useful or enjoyable, like looking at your Facebook or Twitter updates, may be hard to take when you’re feeling low. ”Why wasn’t I invited to that party?”, you wonder. “Look at all the great things these other, non-depressed people are doing!”  If your social network checkins leave you prone to FOMO or self-criticism, skip the networking until you’re back in good spirits.
4. Tell the truth. If you’re feeling low because you’ve done something wrong, or for some other reason you don’t feel comfortable discussing with your friends, the Internet is your ticket to the power of conversation. Take a weight off your shoulders by confessing your secrets on a site like PostSecret or Group Hug.
5. Indulge a hobby. Tackle a long-deferred project, like crafts or home improvements, by getting how-to advice from a site like Instructables.
6. Find birds of a feather.  Whatever ails you, chances are that several hundred, thousand or million other people are going through something similar. Find an online forum, blog or social network for people facing the same challenge, and consider keeping your participation anonymous so that you can be candid about the support you need. (Depending on the subject, you may want to consider a proxy server and disposable email address so that your participation is entirely untraceable.)
7. Ask for it. Need a little extra love? Tweet, Facebook or blog your need for a boost — judiciously. Judiciously means limiting your requests for love to a maximum of one a month, and to writing your request in a way that is genuine without sounding so needy, whiny or vulnerable that it makes other people uncomfortable. Keep it short and sweet: “Feeling blue — Internets, would love a little dose of affection/cheer right now.
8. Look at kittens. Or goats snuggling with puppies. Or videos of babies laughing at inanimate objects. The Internet is absolutely plastered with adorable, amusing and (brace yourself) heartwarming pictures and videos. Even if you’re the kind of person who usually uses a “Hanging in there” poster as a dart board, you can allow yourself the occasional moment of sappiness. Just make sure your webcam is off in case you start to tear up.
9. Give as good as you get. Even if you don’t believe that what comes around goes around, you may find that cheering up others is a great way to elevate your own mood. Send a “thinking of you” email to a friend who’s been struggling of late; write a loving wall post for a friend who’s just Facebooked a frustration; search Twitter for the word “sad” and send kind words to a random stranger. Get out of your own head, and do something for someone else: it’s a sure-fire boost.

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When I was a small child my mother dropped me onto a hard, stone floor. Miraculously, I was uninjured.  As soon as I stopped crying, it seemed, I was as good as new. It would take years before the long-term repercussions of this fall became apparent: the tumble had caused hyper localized, irreparable damage to the portion of the brain allocated for writing or comprehending CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).

At least, that’s what I’ve been forced to infer. I am pretty geeky, and I have spent oodles of time mastering all sorts of useful, useless and marginally useful tech skills, including HTML, basic Linux and even a bit of PHP. But CSS eludes me, even after an apparent breakthrough last spring in which I finally (briefly) had an aha! moment in which it all became clear to me. Until it didn’t, again. Like I said: brain damage.

For a long time, I found this massively frustrating, especially since my coping mechanism involves relying on my husband for all but the most trivial CSS tweaks. I hate having to ask him, for the 500th time, what the difference is between an element and a selector. I go through the online CSS manuals yet again, reading a dozen equally impenetrable explanations, before I yield to the inevitability of asking Rob for help. Then I seethe when he once again tries to explain it in a way that actually sticks.

If there is a silk purse inside this sow’s ear, it’s the discovery of a bit of empathy for all those who toil in the salt mines of digital frustration. (How’s that for a mixed metaphor?) As a geek, I generally live by the credo, “Big woman, small computer.” In other words, with enough determination and time, plus a decent internet connection, I should be able to puzzle my way through just about anything. I’m mystified by the idea that people would give up on a tech dilemma rather than spend 10 hours trying to master it.

Until I spend an hour delving into CSS. Then, I get it: that horrible, confidence-sapping experience of tackling a problem that your brain utterly fails to comprehend. You make some headway, only to feel the knowledge seeping out of your braincells faster than you can make further progress towards a solution. Help files, reference books or kind friends patiently explain the topic to you, reassuring you that it’s easy, or at least, well within your grasp….which only leaves you all-the-more frustrated when you somehow fail to live up to their modest expectations.

As the (sometimes) kind friend, I can only blush at the number of times I’ve reassured bullied colleagues or family members that really, this tech skill is within their grasp. I’ve meant to be supportive and encouraging, but I suspect that for every person I’ve helped move forward, there’s another who’s been too embarrassed to admit that actually, no, it’s not really that easy or that clear.

CSS, thank you for reminding me of the painful humiliation of tech defeat. Maybe one day I’ll summit your perplexing Everest. Until then, thank goodness for helpful friends.

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The fourth time I got a call from the principal’s office, I knew I had to rethink our school year. One of our kids was having a tough time in class, and I had already made several visits to the teacher, the classroom and the principal’s office. Not only was I worried about my kid, I was also stressing out on the work front (after ducking out of a couple of meetings to make emergency trips to school) and at home (where Rob and I were in daily negotiations over how to handle successive crises). If only I could find the magic switch that would make school days an effortless, serene experience for both kids, we could get back to our real life: you know, the life in which I drop the kids in the morning, press pause on my life as a parent, and resume family life at 5:30 for a few delightful hours each evening.

After that fourth call, it was time to let go of the fantasy. This, it seems, is the new reality: a reality in which the daily challenges of school are my challenges as well as my kids’. Instead of the emergency visits that might come at any time, we decided to schedule daily visits to school, so both we and our kids would know when one or the other parent was going to appear. We told the teacher to count on our regular arrival time, and to set aside work we could do to be helpful while we were in the classroom. We opened our calendars, and made a schedule of who would cover which days. We stopped resisting, and decided to lean in.

“Leaning in” is the practice of accepting what you have tried to avoid, resist, or struggle against. As Tara Brach puts it in Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha,

As we lean in, we are inviting, moving toward what we habitually resist. Leaning in allows us to touch directly the quivering, the shakiness, the gripping tightness that is fear. Whether it is a familiar but vague feeling of anxiety or a strong surge of fear, leaning in can help us become aware and free in the midst of our experience.

Leaning in is a practice I have explored before, at other moments when life has presented challenges that I failed to avoid, escape or overcome. The job that exhausted and depressed me but which I couldn’t bear to quit. The romance that sagged with the weight of weekly conversations about a possible breakup. The family relationship that was profoundly estranged, but not totally abandoned. Each time I leaned in — allowing myself to hate the job, suspend the continual evaluation, admit the absence — space opened up, and the relationship shifted.

Yet it’s a practice I must rediscover each time, almost as if I’d never had this lesson. Only when every other avenue has closed do I remember that acceptance is still an option. And only with that acceptance do I discover that it brings not simply relief, but often great joy.

As I’ve renewed my acquaintance with this experience of leaning in, I’ve found myself wondering how it might apply to life online. There are so many online challenges that we resist or struggle against, trying to return to some extinct (and often idealized) version of a pre-Internet existence.

The most immediate example is no further than your inbox. How I’ve struggled with the onslaught of email, even going so far as to declare a vendetta! And yet the one person I know who seems to have made peace with that onslaught is a colleague who told me that he makes a point of processing every single message he receives, and responding to every single email that warrants an answer. The rest of his life bends around this core commitment. When he described this practice to me, it seemed somewhere between unfathomable and crazy, but now I see it: he’s leaning in.

Of course, it’s not always obvious what leaning in would actually look like. If you’re overwhelmed by the pressure to blog, tweet and Facebook, does leaning in mean committing to a daily practice on all three fronts? Or does it mean taking a social media break, and giving yourself the freedom to live offline? If you’re obsessed with your Klout, do you throw yourself into reaching the highest number, or throw in the towel and go Klout-less? If you dread what feels like a mandatory email session each weekend, do you go entirely offline from Friday night to Monday morning, or carry your Blackberry and set it to buzz you as soon as a message arrives?

I think you’ll know the answer when you embrace one of those apparent extremes. If you’re still struggling and suffering, you’ve probably leaned the wrong way. If you’ve given yourself fully to that choice, and you find that the sense of struggle has evaporated, you’re on the right track — even if the act of leaning in takes a lot of work in and of itself. There’s a difference between work and struggle.

In our recent struggle at school, leaning in has been nothing short of transformative. After years of waving vaguely to the gaggle of girls that greet my daughter at the edge of the school grounds, I’m joining them for lunch and learning their names, their favourite foods and their latest gossip. I know which of my son’s classmates need reminders to put on their outdoor shoes, and who needs help opening a thermos. When we sit down to dinner as a family, I know which of the day’s events to ask about, and which are better left forgotten.

And instead of dreading the ringing phone that tells me an emergency visit is once again required, I get the joy of anticipating a midday break with a bunch of wriggling, joyful kids. Some of the best moments of the past weeks are those I’ve spent in an elementary school classroom: introducing kids to the grasshopper who appeared in our laundry hamper, thinking up math puzzles that speak to the division of cupcakes, teaching little ones to draw a triangle. They’re not experiences I would have sought out, or even imagined I’d enjoy. But in leaning in, I’ve not only found relief from a painful struggle, but delight in discovering new parts of myself.

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Yesterday I received what I accurately diagnosed as the Best Error Message Ever:

Being a deeply religious person, I figured that an error message this…ummm…ironic? apt? transcendant?…must be some kind of sign from the universe. At first I thought it might be a sign to stop using Microsoft software, but then I thought, hey, surely the universe isn’t that literal. I went to bed with the kind of spiritual unease that will be familiar to anyone who has ever been dealt a contradictory set of Tarot cards, a cup full of inscrutable tea leaves or an out-of-context paragraph from Revelation.

But this morning when I awoke, the meaning was clear: it was a metaphor. (The universe is very big on metaphor.) More precisely, it was a reminder to stop trusting my error logs, and do a more careful assessment of whether my professional and personal technologies are really working for me.

It’s a question we all need to ask ourselves regularly. Any of us knows enough to freak out over an inbox with 2000 unread messages, or a computer that crashes every three hours, or a phone that drops calls while surrounded by 82 cell phone towers. What we’re missing is the broader, more subtle early warning system: the signs that tell us when something just ain’t right with our online lives.

In my physical life, I know exactly what that kind of sign looks like: swollen glands. Thanks to a year of elementary school spent in a near-constant state of strep throat, the glands in my throat turn into baseballs if my white blood cells even think about taking a nap. It’s a bit uncomfortable, but it gives me a sign to double up on the vitamin C, lay off the booze, and get a good night of sleep — which can usually be counted on to ward off whatever virus triggered the gland flare-up. It’s a warning system that works great because it kicks in early enough for me to do something about it.

When I look at my geeked-out friends — or at myself — I can see that the immune system for our online lives is sorely lacking. People ask the hard questions about their online lives when their boyfriends or wives dump them, when their kids complain about how Mummy loves her Blackberry more than she loves them, or when a weekend away from the Internet leaves them sick with anxiety. In other words, once it’s too late.

And the less geeky are equally vulnerable to a stealth attack. They don’t ask about the health of their tech ecosystem until their boss tells them that the reason they missed out on that promotion is because they’re known as the office Luddite. They always seem to hear the latest industry or office news from someone else (someone who uses Twitter). They’re still relying on a paper calendar, but wonder why they didn’t get invited to that last meeting (booked through Google Calendar).

Whether you err on the side of over- or under-investing in your online life, you’re equally in need of a digital immune system: a set of indicators that serve as early warning signs of a potential (but still preventable) problem. Here are 10 signs that you may need to increase (or decrease) your Daily Dose of Internet:

You may need to gear down if…

• You get upset if your friends get beta invitations to a new web service before you’ve joined it.
• You haven’t been offline for more than 24 hours in the past 6 months.
• You have more friends you feel emotionally connected to online than you have offline.
• You can’t enjoy an experience unless you can blog, tweet, Facebook or otherwise share it.
• When you hear about a new digital trend, product or service, your first thought is, “How can I get that?”

You may need to gear up if…

• You feel anxious when someone asks you to use a new gadget or piece of software.
• You are frequently confused by conversations in which other people are talking about websites or tools you’ve never heard of.
• You have missed more than 3 party, event or meeting invitations in the past year because you don’t use the social network, calendaring system or invitation service used to organize it.
• You have no idea what your kids are up to online, and when they reassure you it’s the same as all the other kids in their school, you have no idea if that’s true.
• When you hear about a new digital trend, product or service, your first thought is, “How can I avoid that?”

Even if some of these signs apply to you, that doesn’t mean you have a problem. What it does mean is that you need to step back and look at the time you spend online, and whether it’s helping you meet your personal and professional goals. Maybe you need to gear up in order to stay engaged with your colleagues, friends and family. Maybe you need to gear down in order to remember that you have colleagues, friends and family.

Either way, it’s important to identify the early warning sign or signs that will prompt you to ask yourself about your online habits, before they get you in trouble. Just make sure it’s a sign that will appear more frequently than the Best Error Message Ever.

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Even in Vancouver, summer has finally arrived. (It’s the three months between the end of our seasonal hockey riots and the resumption of the Rainy Shitness.)  Ahh, summer: once school lets out and the sunshine pours down, it feels like time to take a vacation.

I am told that in some cultures, the term “vacation” may involve such rituals as turning off the computer, putting an auto-responder on your e-mail account and even (shudder) going out out of 3G range. If your spouse or kids or friends are begging you to unplug as part of your vacation together — or if, more improbably, you are taking a self-imposed break from all things online — you might as well make a virtue out of necessity and get something out of the experience.

Your vacation from the Internet may prove much more rewarding if you follow the example of Black Girl in Maine (aka Shay Stewart-Bouley), who has a terrific post today about her experience unplugging from social media for a weekend. I particularly appreciated her experiment because she approached it with a sense of curiosity rather than panic. Instead of the “OMG I’m soooo addicted” tone that often forms the jumping-off point for would-be fasters, BGIM’s post is measured and reflective.

Her post inspired me to think about what would make for a good social media vacation. Not as I’d define it: my idea of a good social media vacation is two weeks spent entirely online. But for those who want a vacation from social media, these questions can make the experience more meaningful:

1. What do you want to get from your vacation? I often read posts by people who have unplugged for the sake of unplugging. But unplugging can be a lot more useful if you know why you want to sever yourself from the hive mind. As BGIM writes about selling her “spousal unit” on the idea of a weekend offline,  ”I won’t say that I was met with resistance but I did have to clarify exactly what the goal was”.
2. What will make your vacation feasible? Many of us punt on the idea of unplugging because there is some situation that precludes us logging out, whether it’s a painfully-awaited e-mail or a game of Facebook Scrabble we aren’t prepared to concede. BGIM and her partner agreed to allow themselves one hour online per day in case they had to deal with client emails, and while BGIM confesses that she went a bit over her hour, she still largely kept to the spirit of their plan. Setting up an exceptions rule — whether it’s for a limited amount of online time, or for specific types of activities or devices (like games only, or phones only) — may be just the trick to making a vacation possible.
3. What are your metrics? Before you go offline, think about how you’ll track the impact. Will it be the quality of your sleep? Your mood?  Your ability to sustain an uninterrupted thought for gosh I could use a snack but it’s almost time to pick the kids up hey a tweet.  You may be surprised at both the payoffs and challenges of unplugging.  My favorite part of BGIM’s post is how she describes the way she noticed the impact of going offline:
   

   When the girl child (I think she is outgrowing the kidlet moniker) asks me something, I found even when I was reading a book, it was far easier to simply put it down and tend to her need. Unlike the times when I am plugged in either to my laptop or Droid, and inevitably I tell her just a moment, baby. This weekend there were few just a moment baby minutes and I loved it.

4. What did you learn? When your social media vacation is over, take a little bit of time to reflect on your experience and note what you’ve learned. Amazingly, your blog may not be the place to share (all) these lessons, since your blog readers may not appreciate hearing that once you were liberated from their voracious demand for your latest posts, you realized that your life was richer without them. But your social media friends may well appreciate hearing insights like BGIM’s observation that “without the sweet pull on places like Twitter, it turns out that I could churn out a funder’s report far faster than usual because I was not distracted.
5. What will you do differently? If your social media vacation felt valuably different from your day-to-day life online, you may want to adopt some new practices that reshape how you relate to life online. BGIM noted that her family’s weekend offline led to a discussion about the role of screens in their lives, and inspired them to start a new project of reading out loud together: “We are now starting to compile a list of books that we will read together; looks like the next up will Voltaire’s Candide.” Whether your unplugging leads you to reconsider the habit of reaching for your phone whenever you have a spare moment, or adopting offline hours as part of your daily routine, it’s worth documenting your resolutions — both what you intend to do differently, and why it feels important. Once again, your blog or Twitter feed is a great place for doing that.

Are you taking a social media vacation this summer? If you’re unplugging, I’d love to hear about what you hope to learn. And if you’re not unplugging — if you’re taking my kind of social media vacation — please don’t tell me about it. You’ll only make me jealous.

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In a thoughtful post about The Pitfalls of social media, Aleksandr Voinov writes

Social Media exerts pressure on us to do things immediately and respond to everything immediately. I’m not sure about you, but sometimes I like to think things through and discuss it with other people before I respond. Your Twitter and Facebook accounts make this almost impossible. Basically, people can easily bully you into responding AT ONCE.

The temporal pressure Voinov is describing is the same pressure that Sherry Turkle worries about in Alone Together. She argues that

[I]n the technology-induced pressure for volume and velocity, we confront a paradox. We insist that our world is increasingly complex, yet we have created a communications culture that has decreased the time available for us to sit and think uninterrupted. As we communicate in ways that ask for almost instantaneous responses, we don’t allow sufficient space to consider complicated problems.

The pace of online communications cuts both ways, of course. One of the thrills of online communications is its efficiency — look at how quickly Facebook lets you tell all your friends about your new baby, compared to reaching them one-on-one! — even if that efficiency has its costs (like hearing their joyful congratulations). There’s a charm to the volley of IM or texting, which combines the immediacy of real-time communications with the archival value of transcription. And one of the delights of email in particular (as opposed to a real-time phone call) is that you can respond when it’s convenient for you, rather than being at the mercy of your caller.

But Voinov and Turkle are right in noting that the pace of online communications exacts a toll, particularly now that so many of us have 24/7 Internet access via home connectivity, smartphones, laptops and tablets, such that we can in fact be reachable just about any time. How quickly the theoretical ability to reach someone in a pinch, even on a weekend, has turned into an expectation that any e-mail, sent any time, should get a same-day (or even same-hour response). It’s wonderful that I can get other people to reply to my inquiries at any time, but I wish I didn’t have to reply to theirs.

When I recently asked my friends and colleagues for their advice on how to live online, one of the tips that has most disquieted me spoke to this exact conundrum. My friend Leda Dederich posed a tempting but daunting challenge:

Resist the tennis match! Just because you can, it doesn’t mean you have to respond immediately. Invoke your letter writing days. Don’t be afraid of “delayed responses”. Meaningful communication depends on it.

I am deathly afraid of delayed responses. And in musing on Leda’s advice, as I have for the past month, I’ve come up with a range of strategies and practices that can help you mitigate the (often illusory) urgency of online communications, while still allowing you to enjoy the benefits of its rapid pace. Here are 8 ways you can conquer the urgency imperative:

1. Create an alternate inbox. If you’re obsessed with Inbox Zero, it’s easy to let that obsession drive the pace of your online communications. When I’ve just been through the ordeal of getting my inbox back to empty, I find myself racing to reply to messages just so that I can delete them from my inbox. A better approach is to create a “holding tank”: put messages that you want to reply to later in there, and process them when it makes sense for you. If you feel tempted to reply to a message just to get rid of it, force yourself to
2. Stick to a schedule. The pace of your online communications is largely determined by the expectations other people have for how quickly you reply…but you get to drive those expectations. Once people discover that you answer every email within 15 minutes, even on a Saturday, I can guarantee you’ll be getting email 7 days a week. Decide on the hours when you’ll be available for each online channel — you may want to keep different hours for email, Facebook, Twitter and IM — and be scrupulous about only replying or sending messages during your designated windows.
3. Use multiple devices. Separating home and work phones isn’t just for people who work in Blackberry offices but want an iPhone for fun. You might like a two-phone lifestyle if you want to shut off company calls during evenings and weekends. (Just get very clear on your office policy and your boss’ expectations.) Similarly, you may want to have a separate computer (or maybe a tablet) for messing around online after hours, without the temptation of checking (and replying to) email.
4. Use multiple accounts. I keep my online communications simple by forwarding all of my 87 email addresses to a single Gmail account so that I can check them all in one place. (No, I don’t actually have 87 email addresses…it just feels that way.) But I can still check any one of those accounts separately, so when I go on vacation I make a point of only checking the email address I use for strictly personal correspondence. That way I don’t get a work email and feel anxious about responding to it.
5. Send later. Just because you like to handle your incoming communications between 7-10 pm doesn’t mean you have to reply to evening communications in real time. It can be very useful to tackle your overflowing inbox after hours, but it defeats the purpose of having catch-up time if people start using those evening hours to send you even more inquiries and tasks. By all means, draft your replies in the evening or on weekends (if that’s when you want to work) but set those messages on a time delay so that they actually send during the window you have scheduled for e-mail. Use the send later feature  in Outlook, a service like LetterMeLater or an extension like Boomerang for Gmail. Use a tool like HootSuite to queue up your tweets and Facebook updates so they go out during your scheduled social media hours. Remember, the point isn’t (just) about limiting when you handle your various inboxes: it’s about setting other people’s expectations for the times of day when they might hear from (or reach) you.
6. Create exceptions. Maybe you like the idea of limiting your online communications to certain hours of the day, but there’s somebody (or a few somebodies) stopping you. If you’re reading this post and thinking “I don’t want my boss to think she can’t reach me after hours!”, “I can’t turn off my cell phone in case the babysitter calls!” or “But if I turn off IMs, I won’t get my husband’s sexy noon-hour messages!” then you need to create an exception (or two) before you create your new only-sometimes-on communications scheme. Set up a gmail rule that notifies you by SMS when your boss emails, and copies those emails to a separate address (so you can read her email without seeing everything else that is piling up in your inbox over the weekend.) Get a super cheap pre-paid cell phone that you can take with you on date nights, give that number to your sitter, and leave your Blackberry at home. Create a separate IM account that you can stay logged into even when your main Skype, MSN or AIM account is set to “away”, and never miss a dirty message from your sweetie. You may have to do a little extra work to set up new ways for your exceptions to reach you, but it’s worth the effort if it allows you to turn off the rest of the world.
7. Set a minimum response time. Many of us work in organizations that have a formal or informal standard for the maximum acceptable response time: all client inquiries should get a reply by end of business, all emails should get a reply within 24 hours, all tweets should get an answer within 2 hours. That is good for your business but bad for your sanity. So make sure you also set a minimum response time for each channel: the number of minutes, hours or even days that must elapse before you reply to a message. You can set a different minimum for each channel: maybe Facebook only needs a 3-minute delay (imagine your funny wall comment, take a breath, read the next person’s comment, come back, leave your own comment) but email needs 24 hours (so you ensure that all your emails are sent with the benefit of some level of reflection, and you avoid the problem of email volleyball). You need minimums for your own personal response times (to force yourself to breathe before you answer) and you can also look at setting minimum response times for your department or organization (to encourage more thoughtful responses). And whatever your minimum response time is, make sure you quadruple it for any message that has made you angry (so you reply calmly).
8. Focus on quality instead of speed. One of the reasons it’s hard to resist the rapid-fire pace of online communications is that we get lots of positive feedback for being quick responders, and negative feedback for being slow. Get back to someone in 10 minutes and they are likely to thank you for it; wait a day to handle that email and you may get a tweet, text or call asking why you haven’t replied. Hearing praise or complaints about how other people handle their online communications (“I love how she always replies to my tweets within 5 minutes” or “He is terrible about replying to email”) further reinforces the sense that we are judged by the speed of our replies. But you can help break that habit by talking about the quality (rather than speed) of other people’s messages, and by focusing on building a reputation for quality in your own. For guidance on how to improve the quality of your messages, check out Stever Bridger’s post about how to write better emails or the Hopkinson Report on how to write great tweets.

Do you have ideas about how to escape the urgency trap in online communications? Tweet your ideas to @awsamuel or leave them in the comments field below….very slowly.

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It’s gems like this excerpt from actor Bill Hunter’s obituary that have long made the obituary page one of my favourite parts of the newspaper. When somebody’s life is summed up in an article, you don’t just get the latest newsworthy glimpse, scandal or accomplishment: you get the broad strokes, the highlights and the quirky, characteristic anecdotes.

But all-too-appropriately, the obituary feels like it’s dying. In a world in which Facebook profiles turn into living memorials, and in which anyone’s life can increasingly be surveyed through its digital remains, the newspaper obituary feels strangely static. The information and reflections it contains may (or may not) compete with a Wikipedia entry in doing justice to someone’s public profile, but by virtue of the standard journalistic practice of pre-writing notables’ obituaries, they are intrinsically dated — so much so that Elizabeth Taylor actually outlived the journalist who wrote her obituary. They not only fail to capture the reactions and sentiments that can emerge around the news of someone’s death; they may actually miss the larger cultural zeitgeist that a significant loss can evoke or even trigger.

I’m not suggesting that obituaries should be read on your iPad, accompanied by a scrolling Twitter feed in which people record their reactions to the tragic news. That’s merely crass, without actually crossing over the chasm and becoming so crass as to actually redefine the obituary itself.

To cross the crassness chasm, you’ve got to be ruthlessly honest about how obituaries are actually written and read. Obituaries are scorecards: the final report card on what you did (or didn’t do) with your life. And how better to compile the ultimate scorecard than by crowdsourcing its verdict?

Surely I’m not the only person who reads an obituary with a mental soundtrack that goes “wow…wow…geez…wow…ouch…wow”. I scan back up to the deceased’s age, weigh their accomplishments agains their years, decide whether their death was timely or tragic. I pore over the list of survivors and the quotes from friends and family for a sense of the personal life that flourished or shrank in the shadow of the public life. And then I find myself asking: if this were my obituary, how would I feel about how I’d lived my life?

Thanks to the miracle of crowdsourcing tools like Uservoice and Ideastorm, that question could in theory be converted to a metric. Just run through the standard battery of social media features and give them a morbid spin:

• Let people vote obituaries up or down, according to whether you would be happy living that life.
• Give people their personal “favorites” list of the 10 people they’d most like to be like by the time they die.
• Share an obituary on Facebook or Twitter, tagging the friends you think should aspire to live like this person did.
• Break the scoring down by category so you can rate each deceased person according to professional accomplishments, apparent quality of personal life, or for that matter, hotness.
• Create a leader board of the best dead people who ever lived.

As horrific as this sounds, there is actually a shred of virtue in the scheme. At its best, the instinct to read an obituary as a scorecard is an opportunity to reflect on what does or doesn’t amount to a life well-lived. Evaluate someone else’s life — the awards won vs. marriages destroyed, the public accomplishments vs. the private demons — and you are implicitly thinking through your own mortality. What do you want your obituary to say? How would you want your scorecard to rate? And most of all, which combination of software tools will help you achieve it?

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