I've been getting back into the habit of using del.icio.us bookmarking much more often of late.

Not sure why I'd fallen off the del.icio.us wagon, but now that I'm using it more often I find the value keeps creeping up incrementally in unexpected ways. Like most social software, it needs to be worked on for the real value to emerge.

That's not the point of this post, though. Merely a segue into a terrific piece I just re-discovered by trawling back through my old bookmarks.

Leigh Householder, aka Advergirl, keeps an entertaining blog about her adventures inside the advertising business.

A few months back, she put up this post about the "real job description" for any decent Account Executive. Leigh writes from her knowledge of the advertising side of the house, but her counsel is just as valid for anyone in the PR business. I love this post. Inspirational, direct, and right-on-the-money.

Go read it.

Indigo Books & Music, Canada's biggest bookseller, has just unveiled an exceedingly cool, but (IMHO) sadly flawed new online community. At least, I think they just unveiled it.

The news release went out yesterday - same day that they wallpapered a number of subway trains on the TTC with a mass of advertising. But according to this blog post, quoted in the release, they actually launched several weeks ago.

Either way, I want to state first of all that this was an absolutely terrific idea.

Books and bibliophiles naturally tend to create strong communities of shared interest - both online and off. People already gather in the comfy chairs in any Chapters/Indigo store, and natter about the books that surround them. Traditional neighbourhood book clubs are another obvious example.

The same kind of thing also happens in a number of places online, of course. There's a nice Visual Bookshelf plugin for Facebook, for example, and then there's the wonderful LibraryThing, the original social networking site for bibliophiles.

So for Canada's largest retail bookseller to throw themselves into the middle of the social software space, inviting Canadian book lovers to come and hang out in their virtual comfy chairs makes damn good sense. Smart move.

From a first quick run through of the site, it looks like it's an exceptionally feature-rich and promising social space, with all of the usual YASNS features (Friends, Favourites, Groups, rich Profile info, mini-blogs, etc.) and a number of special sections tailored for book-lovers (Top 10 Lists, Recommendations, Reviews, the obligatory "Shelf", etc.).

I'm inclined to like it - or, at least, I'm really trying to.

Unfortunately, my very first experience of the site got me off to a bit of a grumpy start. Here's the first problem I encountered when trying to set up a profile:


In case you can't tell from that screencap, the error message says:

! We need you to correct or provide more information.
Please note the following:
* Incorrect Information - ensure that your last name does not contain any special characters (e.g. %>?).

I know I should be used to this by now, but I still find the kind of sloppy database coding that flags the apostrophe in my surname as a "special" or "invalid" character annoying and, frankly, a little insulting. Forcing me to misspell my name in order to register because your system thinks an apostrophe is "Incorrect information" is just dumb.

Of course, I got over myself, and signed up as Michael OConnor Clarke, but things didn't get much better after that.

The next big thing to flip my cranky bit is the site's mandatory Terms of Use. I'm not sure how many of the people signing up for this thing will take the time to read all the legalese, but there's some seriously worrying text in there that is worth highlighting. It's this bit, in particular, that I find troubling (with my italics):

The User acknowledges that any content, e-mails, postings, offers, software, videos, photos, text, graphics, music, sounds, questions, creative suggestions, messages, feedback, ideas, recipes, notes, drawings, articles, stories or other information, data, materials and opinions (including, without limitation any postings on community forums) ("Submissions") that he or she may provide, e-mail, post, upload or otherwise transmit to the Website shall be deemed and shall remain the property of Indigo, including all copyright, without reservation, and User waives in favour of Indigo any and all moral rights in such Submissions.

There's more (much, much more) where that came from. Some of the provisions are pretty much what you'd expect, and not all that different from the terms of use in place at Facebook and other popular social networking services.

The fact that they assert their right to "make such copies... as We deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the Submissions on the Website," is understandable and perfectly acceptable to me. If I'm going to invest any time in this thing, I want you to be responsible for backups.

Then there's the fairly standard wording granting Indigo the rights to take user generated content and republish, redistribute, or prepare derivative works from it. Not surprising, and something I've encountered without too much concern in other online communities.

But this thing about them claiming complete copyright ownership of every single pixel contributed by the members of the community - that just seems wrong. Presented in the context of an online community designed for authors and readers, I find it particularly jarring.

The advertising campaign they're using to launch the new community features a number of "Featured Profiles". They've persuaded several well-known authors and celebrities to sign up and create profiles on the system already, such that you can check out what Rick Mercer is reading, or see what books Jan Wong or Ben Mulroney recommend.

I wonder what these illustrious contributors think about the fact that Indigo owns every note, every image, every last little word they post on the site...? How does A.J. Jacobs feel to know that the entertaining blurb he posted to the site about his new book, "The Year of Living Biblically", is now the intellectual property of Indigo?

I know I'm not a lawyer, and it's entirely possible that I'm misinterpreting, over-interpreting, or just simply mis-reading that section of the Terms of Use - but doesn't it seem a little audacious to you?

The other issue I have with this new Community is, I'll confess, a bit of a silly one - related to one of the general (and also rather silly) little issues I have with Indigo as a whole.

For the record: I think they're a really good business. My taste in bookstores tends to skew towards the smaller, rather more personal end of the scale. If I'm a bookstore chain fan at all, I guess I'm more of a Book City guy than an UberBiblioMegaCorp fan. Online, I naturally default to Amazon.ca, more out of habit and familiarity than anything else.

But I do like Indigo. Their site is a good one and their Indigo, Chapters, and Coles stores are generally pretty nice. I just wish someone over there could sort out their branding.

It's been six years since Canada's two largest retail booksellers merged, and yet their website is still stuck with that awkward post-merger name munge: chapters.indigo.ca. Why? That continues to irritate me for reasons I can't really put my finger on. It just does.

And I'm feeling the same vague irritation about this new Indigo Online Community - why couldn't they give the poor thing a half-decent name. I can see it's an "online community", that's obviously what it is. But using such a generic description as the actual name of the thing seems just lazy and a real missed opportunity.

Brand it, for goodness sake. Add some sizzle to the sausage and give us something we can remember; some convenient catchy shorthand we can use instead of this unimaginative, literal (and not literate) label.

HE: "Hey - have you checked out the great new Indigo Online Community"
SHE: "No - what's it called?"
HE: "Um... the Indigo Online Community"
SHE: "Yawn"

Bookclub.ca looks like it might be for sale. Or bookplace.ca - that could work too. Ah, but you want to include the music and DVDs part. OK - so something less obvious, perhaps...

In no particular order:

purple.ca
azure.ca
indigoclub.ca
indigo20.ca (It's Indigo 2 dot Oh, baby!)

Or even:

myindigo.ca (I mean, come on - you already own that one. It's almost a no-brainer)

Anyway. Excellent idea. Not bad execution. Utterly repellent Terms of Use. Zero points for creative branding.

I really want to like this more than I do right now, so I'm going to continue to explore the thing a little more. With those absurd terms in place, it's never going to be my social network of choice, but I'm curious to watch how it grows.

Looking forward to what promises to be a lively and interesting debate on CBC Radio One tonight:

The Future Of The Future Of News – Citizen Journalism Gets Asked the Tough Questions

They're hosting a live panel discussion featuring Andrew Keen (Cluetrain-detractor and "Cult of the Amateur" author), Wikinomics researcher Rahaf Harfoush and my old friend and NowPublic co-founder Leonard Brody.

I really like the neutral, balanced way the CBC has framed this discussion in the description on their site, and I'd like to think that it will manage to stay out of the "When Bloggers Attack" mire, but I have my doubts, alas.

I caught a teaser for tonight's program on CBC's "Spark" this afternoon, with UBC Journalism student, Catherine Rolfsen, interviewing two of the panelists (Keen and Harfoush). Depressing to note that the conversation strayed all too quickly into the well-trodden and barren "us vs. them" territory.

Bah! It's AND logic, people. AND not OR, and certainly not VS.

Professional journalism and news-making is still a process. Citizen journalism is both different and complementary. Vive la difference!

Given the CBC's enthusiastic and smart adoption of social media tools and techniques, I'm really hoping they'll manage this discussion such that it stays above the pointless and hackneyed Blogs vs. MSM smackdown - surely we're past that by now?

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that one of Keen's main points in the interview earlier today was that Citizen Journalism had effectively killed the market for journalists - that the idea of "giving away one's intellectual product for free" was tolling the death knell for journalism as a career. He went so far as to suggest to the student interviewer that she should abandon all hope of a career in journalism, as there wouldn't be any such jobs by the time she entered the market.

Rot.

I remember a good friend of mine - a former senior staffer at the National Post - presenting a version of this argument when I first started blogging. He couldn't understand why I would want to write so much stuff that I wasn't getting paid for.

That same bloke is now one of the most successful and well-known bloggers in his own area of expertise, and seems to have a nice extra line of income from his main blog. He's also still a practicing freelance journalist for the mainstream media, and happily navigates the two worlds with equal skill and enthusiasm.

Productivity. Billable Hours. Commitments. To Do Lists. Deliverables. Frazzle. Blah.

In our careers, I think we all go through periods of peak performance – those times when work is intense and the pressure is high, but things just seem to be flowing.

And then there’s those other, stressful times. Times when the workload overwhelms us and instead of rising to the challenge we fall into the grey blur of frazzle mode – spread too thin to give any one thing the full attention it deserves. The times when stuff falls off the list and life – work life, home life, inner life – suffers.

Of late, there’s been rather too much of the latter and not enough of the wonderful, exhilarating, rewarding former.

Enough. I miss that good zone. Time to get back.

In the time-slicing, multi-tasking world we inhabit these days, there’s no end of tips and tools, self-help sites and books aimed at helping us create that zone for ourselves, manage it and stay in it.

Problem is, I find the idea of these things has a certain enduring appeal, but I’ve never quite managed to find the plate-spinning system that just feels right and natural for the way I work.

From the relatively simple and intuitive single tactical ideas (task lists, time boxing), to the comprehensive systems like Dave Allen’s legendary “Getting Things Done” – I’ve researched (and tried) a bunch of them. I have good friends who swear by some of these things.

They’re all attractive and effective for me to some degree, but so often seem to require a certain significant re-wiring of the way my head works. It’s been a long search for the system that feels like me.

Then in the last few days, a coincidence of influences and discussions led me to something of a mini-epiphany earlier this afternoon. A simple twist on established approaches that might just be a part of what I’ve been looking for.

I know, I haven’t blogged in a loooong time. As it turns out, that’s one of the things that has probably contributed to that pervasive feeling of “the blahs” I’ve been feeling.

I miss blogging. I miss the simple act of putting one word after another; miss the feelings of engagement and community. There have been other contributing blah factors of late, but I won’t dwell on those here.

And then four things happened. It started with re-reading this old post on my boss Joe’s blog: “Why I’m Posting Less Frequently”. There’s a lot of simple, straightforward sense and truth in that post.

“There is simply too much information out there that I would like to read and not enough time to read it all,” Joe says. Amen.

Reading Joe's post also reminded me of something the inimitable David Weinberger wrote a while back: "No, I'm not keeping up with your blog." Heh.

And it’s not just the time to read, it’s the time to contribute that is in such short supply.

Then the other night I finally had a chance to meet one of my oldest blogosphere friends in the flesh - Brian Moffatt. Can't remember when I first came across Brian - 2003? 04? But the first time I read his stuff I knew I'd found a kindred spirit. Good ol' BMO.

We met up for over-priced caffeine on the way home earlier this week - as our blogs have intersected, so have our work lives. We shared tales of podcast projects and other social media experiments we've been involved in through our client work; started to think about ways we might get to work together.

We also compared notes on our mutual, individual blogfade. We've both been blogging a long time. We've both gone through extended periods of blog-hiatus.

I remember something Brian wrote to Frank Paynter way back in one of his first haituses (haitii?):

"I was finding the whole experience depressing. Physically I mean. The logistics of blogging. The linking, the maintenance, the obligation. I felt guilty blogging and I felt guilty not blogging daily."

Yup. Been there. It's a weird thing, that obligation part. We all crave an audience - one way or another. I guess we all do it because we enjoy the act of writing. But when feeding the statmeter starts to feel like work; when the guilt that you're not jumping into every thread, not adding to every conversation because there's just too darn many of them (and all the people you like have already written all the things you wish you'd thought to write anyway) - that's when the joy of it fades.

Over-thinking. That's another thing I've got to watch out for. And wandering from my point...

Brian and I agreed that we miss blogging when we're not doing it. That was a good nudge. With Joe's and David's posts still fresh in my mind, I realised that the guilt part is just a huge energy sucker and completely unnecessary. Like my scant handful of readers really give a hoot if I'm not all over every meme the second it first spreads its tiny wings. Hah!

Point is: with the pressure of work, the stress of still not having found that personal GTD magic, the usual insane juggling act of our busy home, and the pointless guilt inflicted by not pursuing one of the big creative outlets I love so much, of not feeding the blog-craving - with all this I was well-primed for the little coaching help that led to today's epiphany.

I've been working for the last couple of weeks with Eileen Chadnick - coach, communicator, and "friend of Thornley Fallis", and I have Eileen to thank for nudging me towards this idea.

We were talking about To Do Lists - why they just don't seem to work for me, and why it's so often the stuff that isn't on the list (but really should be) that gets in the way of achieving what you set out to do.

You know how it goes: you start the day with 5 big scary items on the list. Then you've got to make time to get on top of email (which wasn't on the list). One or two of those messages require additional work - your list is invisibly growing before you've even tackled item one. The phone goes. It's a client with something that needs rapid turnaround (not on the list). Then it's time for your 11am (already?!). OK - 11am done (with two brand new items for the list). Get that quick task turned around for the client. Now - back to item one. Oops - one of your staff needs some advice. Your 1pm is looming. And forty-six new emails. Crap! Item one again. Darn it - must just get my timesheets up to date. And I still haven't blogged today... or read through my feedreader... and I'm not going to be able to make it to that lunch tomorrow... the phone again...arrrgggh!

Eileen and I got to talking about "Covey's Quadrants" which I've read about, heard about, and - heck - even quoted to staff many times over the last few years.

In Stephen Covey's view, work tends to fall into one of four "quadrants":

1. Important and Urgent (crises, deadline-driven projects)
2. Important, Not Urgent (preparation, prevention, planning, relationships)
3. Urgent, Not Important (interruptions, many pressing matters)
4. Not Urgent, Not Important (trivia, time wasters)

Claire Tompkins summarizes the concept pretty neatly here:

This popular technique (definitions courtesy of Amazon review) offers a way to prioritize tasks and to see what you shouldn't be (but often are) spending time on. People tend to get swept up in quadrants I and III because they’re happening right now, they involve other people or outside forces, they are time sensitive and they promote a sense (sometimes illusory) of progress. They spend time in quadrant IV when they’re goofing off (note: this category does not include rest and recreation), hiding out and procrastinating.

As we were talking through ways to apply the lens of these quadrants to managing a daily task list, and talking about making time to take that mental "walk in the snow", we made a couple of leaps and, well, I'm not quite sure how we got to this point, but it struck me that the real list I need to focus on is one that maps out the Things That Matter.

Things That Matter fall into a few simple and obvious buckets:

1. Things That Matter To Me
2. Things That Matter To TFC (i.e. to my employer)
3. Things That Matter To My Clients

Bucket #1 is full of things like: family, health, reading, learning new stuff, walking in the woods, geeking out, and - yes - blogging (both the ing and the ogg of it - the reading and contributing).

Bucket #2 is - obviously - stuff like the billable hours, winning business, recruiting and building great people, effective project and account management (plus other, less prosaic things).

Bucket #3 is chock full of delivering results, quality work, meeting commitments, responsiveness, creative ideas, excellence in execution.

Of course, as Eileen pointed out, this really ought to be done as a Venn diagram - there's necessary and healthy overlap between the three buckets.

It struck me that the central intersection of the three categories is a kind of Michael-ized equivalent of Covey's Quadrant 2 - or it is, at least, that space where you really want to be spending most of your time.

The important thing about this approach for me is that it helps me frame the stuff that's necessary to a healthy work-life balance in a way that feels intuitive. If we don't plan time to do the "Things That Matter To Me" - if we don't "set the intention", as Eileen puts it - then it probably won't get done. That's the first crack through which the stress creeps in - all work and no play.

When Bucket #1 is empty, the other two are too heavy to carry, and the stuff inside them starts to slosh out onto the floor. Balance comes first, as my T'ai Chi teacher says.

So there it is. A pinch of GTD, a nod to Covey, and my own little twist.

I took ten minutes before I left the office tonight to map out a first Things That Matter list for tomorrow, mapped against the time slots in my calendar, with what I think is a healthy balance of ingredients from all three buckets. Fun to do, and I didn't feel any of the tyranny of the never-ending To Do List in the thing.

Will this help to manage the interrupt-driven nature of a typical work day? Not on it's own, no - but it feels like a system I can stick to as it's one that comes from within. Pulling the day back towards the Things That Matter and making sure to categorize the new stuff into the right bucket (or toss it out if it simply doesn't matter) - that feels natural and right.

Next thing you know, I'll be designing a line of customized leather-bound day-timers and TTM™ templates.

TTM™. Tee heeee.