Josue Sierra

I’m taking a Project Management course this summer semester, and my main reading assignment is “The Distance Manager” by Kimball Fisher & Mareen Duncan Fisher. I have poured through the first 3 chapters so far and it has been awesome! Even though many of the management and organizational development principles outlines are targed at Distance Manangers, it seems to me that many of these are more and more applicable for regular project teams.

I saw a comic strip a while ago where a co-worker leans over the cubicle and asks the other team member, “Why won’t you answer my emails?” I think this illustrates the growing physical “disconnect” that can exist even within the same physical work location. My point is that because of the communication techology and other rapidly evolving factors, “Distance Management” principles are more and more applicable even in teams located on the same physical location.

For those of you who just might be discovering my Technology & Communications blog, welcome.

I have just added an email subscription field to the header. This will let you receive my most recent blog posts once a day. If you prefer RSS, thats available at the bottom, as well as on the top right sidebar.

I look forward to hearing from regular readers, as well as from first time visitors.

Josue

I haven’t had a chance to post any more thoughts on my Honduras vacation and more pictures. I’m spending the weekend at the in-laws, enjoying our three-day weekend. Plenty of catching up to do.

Right now, I have over 430 emails that I have not read. Truth be told, most of those are either spam or subscriptions that have lost my interest. I try to delete every email I have decided I won’t read, but I don’t delete emails from co-workers or clients (CYA policy). So, I do have thousands of “read” emails… as you can imagine, I rely on the search function quite extensively.

Perhaps this article has the solution for me:

Last month, venture capitalist Fred Wilson drew a lot of attention on the Internet when he declared a 21st century kind of bankruptcy. In a posting on his blog about technology, Wilson announced he was giving up on responding to all the e-mail piled up in his inbox.

“I am so far behind on e-mail that I am declaring bankruptcy,” he wrote. “If you’ve sent me an e-mail (and you aren’t my wife, partner, or colleague), you might want to send it again. I am starting over.”

College professors have done the same thing, and a Silicon Valley chief executive followed Wilson’s example the next day. Last September, the recording artist Moby sent an e-mail to all the contacts in his inbox announcing that he was taking a break from e-mail for the rest of the year.

I can relate to this statement.

E-mail overload gives many workers the sense that their work is never done, said senior analyst David Ferris, whose firm, Ferris Research, said there were 6 trillion business e-mails sent in 2006. “A lot of people like the feeling that they have everything done at the end of the day,” he said. “They can’t have it anymore.”

I don’t think there is much I can do about the volume of emails I get — its the nature of my chosen field. But, I have learned to control my subscriptions, use junk-accounts for various online activities, and keep personal and work related accounts more separate. Also, I am using RSS aggregator a lot more to consume online content. Like all things in life, it takes intentional effort to make sure my inbox doesn’t get cluttered and flooded by junk.

We have relocated to the northern coast of Honduras to the city of La Ceiba. We are staying at a good friend’s apartment in the outskirts of the city.

Last night I was invited to give a short presentation on Internet Safety to a group of businessmen and their wives from a local Church in San Pedro Sula (www.igcsps.org). It was a lively discussion, and I was pleasantly surprised at the level of Internet usage among the group. I also spent some time during the day meeting with the owners of Danilo’s, a leather accessories manufacturing company here in Honduras. They are considered the best in women’s purses, and men’s belts and wallets. We are talking about Italian-level quality here. I’ll be helping them develop their internet sales and export strategy in the coming year.

This morning, I took a 3 hour bus ride to La Ceiba. We traveled in Vianna. The bus was very nice — nicer than a plane ride, with plenty of leg room, comfy wide chairs, and food & beverage service included. Very enjoyable and very affordable.

I have taken tons of pictures, so hopefully I can get some of those up tonight or tomorrow.

Here is a great resource for those bloggers just starting up.

Many good writers get stuck when they decide to start blogging, mostly because they aren’t sure what they’re shooting for in a blog post.

I’ll write another post about how to choose a post topic in the near future, but regardless of the specific topic, there are some common characteristics of good posts. You’ll come across plenty of exceptions, but it’s one of those “know the rules before you break them” things.

Not sure if all his tips would apply to regular web editing or copywriting, but I would suspect that considering the explosive growth of blogs, more and more web-users are going to start expecting web content to feel the same way — personable, focused, relevant, accurate, and useful. Of course, every website is written that way, right?