• Playing The Sims, which is the ultimate example because it allows me to substitute the mundane activities of a virtual life for the mundane activities of my actual life.
• Rating movies on Flickchart, which pits two movies head-to-head and asks you to choose the better one; I have noticed that once you reach a certain number of movies — for me, it was 600 or so — it only shows the same movies over and over, which makes a pointless exercise even more pointless.
• Updating and rearranging my themed reading lists on Lists of Bests, an activity I find endlessly engaging, but I could be spending that time doing some actual reading, don’t you know.

I call these “avoidance activities” because they suck away hours of my day, hours when I could have been doing something productive or interesting or working toward one of my goals. Instead, I’m avoiding doing anything at all meaningful with these time wasters.

This year, I want to focus instead on purposeful activities. Some examples:

• Spend some meaningful time on my friend’s social network IAM Learning Community, setting goals and getting support from the great network there; this is a great network of people all working toward a similar vision using similar tools and a resource that I am not taking advantage of.
• Blog more. Blogging is a sure-fire way to jump-start my writing engine. I also want to write more meaty blog posts, rather than just tossed off lists of links. My goal is to blog my way to a writing project idea.
• Remember how to do things just for the pleasure of it. Like writing, especially, but also reading, cooking, gardening — all those things that enrich my life.
• Spend more time with friends. I made space to spend one-on-one time with many of my friends over the holidays, and each visit left me feeling more energized and happier. I want more, please.
• Come up with more interesting activities for my son. This will be easier once the weather starts to warm (I truly hate the cold and going out in it), but we are already signed up for a dance class and I am starting a neighborhood playgroup. I also want to reinstate our Saturday family excursions.

In short, I want to waste less of my time and focus more on living my life. It’s not really about accomplishing anything specific so much as about engaging in the process.

I guess you could call this a resolutions post. I don’t like to make resolutions; I prefer to set goals. These are my goals for 2010.

And one prediction: 2010 will be the beginning of a much more positive and affirming decade. The Zero Decade is over, and even though it was a great time in my life, for the world it wasn’t so hot. Time to move forward!

A colleague of mine recently asked this question, which sparked an interesting discussion on our Yammer network: Is social networking learning? Especially in the context of organizations, how can social networking be used for learning?

I certainly use social networking tools like Twitter and blogs for informal, personal learning every day. What I like most about using social networking tools this way is how serendipitous it can be. Sure, I can ask questions or search for knowledge on a subject I know I want to learn about, but more often, it seems, I learn things I didn’t know I needed to learn. This happens when people in my network share what they are learning or thinking about or reading or writing about. That, for me, is where the real learning potential of social networking tools kicks in. I don’t think you can reproduce that quality with formal learning tools, because it is so ephemeral and unplanned.

Here are some other good points made in the conversation:

• “I learn far more about what’s news and relevant to my work from my ‘network of trust and interest’ than I do from common denominator mass media.”
• “Between spontaneous learning and network-of-trust filtering, you get a new level of just-in-time (JIT) learning: ‘before I knew I needed it’ learning.”
• “Not everyone is going to succeed using social learning.  Many of those that can already use it.  Some of the rest just need permission.  But if you aren’t really interested in your work, if you don’t think it is cool, how much is unstructured, social learning going to work for you. “

Someone also made this point: “There seems to be a tension … among the openness of informal learning, risk management and message control.” I think that tension is always there when there is also fear over loss of control. I have found, though, that in successful learning networks, people tend to police themselves. The organization must let go and trust its people, or people just won’t use the network sanctioned by the organization. If they are really passionate about learning and connecting with peers, they will find ways to do so outside of the organization’s control and without the organization’s blessing. So why not extend that trust and see what happens? The organization can only benefit from engaged employees actively learning about their fields.

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Not even the great guru of getting organized, David Allen of Getting Things Done fame, can claim to have the one solution to all of your organization woes. He has developed the perfect system to meet his specific needs, and in his book about it, he shares a lot of good ideas, some of which may work for you or me. The trick is to identify and borrow those ideas that are workable for you, and leave the rest. There’s no need to go to extremes: to either adopt the system wholesale even if it causes you pain or just abandon it altogether and declare it evil. Take what works for you, leave the rest and thank Mr. Allen for sharing.

This is the best approach to all new subjects you are learning about, whether it’s parenting or self improvement or how to manage a project effectively. Read widely and absorb what many people have to say on the subject. Try out those aspects that make sense to you and see if they work for you. If they do, adopt them. Leave the rest. Keep learning and tweaking and adapting as you go along. You are not obligated to all or nothing.

Unfortunately, this is just what proponents of a particular system would have you believe. Take attachment parenting, for instance. If you get at all involved in the community, you might think that if you don’t practice co-sleeping or baby wearing, you aren’t doing “real” attachment parenting. And probably you aren’t, not the way it is defined by its fanatical adherents. However, you can adopt only those aspects of it that make sense for you and your family, and you’ll be doing quite all right. There is no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. And I don’t mean to pick on this one particular community. All “movements” seem to have their extremely rigid adherents who claim that if you don’t practice by the book, you’re not really practicing (even hula-hooping).

I propose that it is better to question, test and draw your own conclusions — in other words, think for yourself — rather than blindly follow any system set down in a book or website.

• Job Searching the Web 2.0 Way
• Setting Up a Job Search Dashboard
• Organizing…
• Setting Up an Online Portfolio
• Developing Your Personal Brand
• Tools for Personal Branding
• Web 2.0 for Job Search
• More on Web 2.0 Job Search
• Tools and Resources for Managing Your Online Reputation

LifeHacker also has some tips on how to find a job with RSS feeds. Also, whip your resume into shape with some help from the Brazen Careerist.

Here is a brief definition of social media from Wikipedia (a social media tool):

Social media use the “wisdom of crowds” to connect information in a collaborative manner. Social media can take many different forms, including Internet forums, message boards, weblogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures and video.

The popularity of “Web 2.0″ destinations like Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and Twitter, plus the explosion of blogs, has taken off for a few simple reasons:

• People find them fun and are willing to spend a lot of free time on these sites.
• People are using them to connect with others like them, fulfilling a basic human need (and putting the “social” into social media).
• These tools are relatively easy to start using, with very little help and training, even for non-techies.

Once organizations–whether companies, nonprofits or other self promoters–start getting into the act, it’s too easy for the fun and social parts to be taken out of the equation. Organizations like to control their message and their content, whereas social media tools thrive on openness. And organizations have a vested interest in promoting themselves rather than having fun with the tools. Once commercialization or PR efforts are suspected, it’s probably a big turnoff for many participants.

I would advise any organization wanting to take advantage of the popularity, ease of use and low cost of social media tools to tread carefully. It’s important that the employees assigned to this are already using these tools personally and are very familiar with the communities and their (often) unwritten rules of interaction. The organization needs to provide something of value to the community, something that the intended audience will naturally respond to and want to participate in; blatant commercialism or self promotion must be avoided. Finally, these efforts take time. It’s best to lurk, listen and learn before diving in.

Here are some good resources for organizations that are looking to capitalize on the social media phenomenon:

• “Should your organization use social media sites?”–The TechSoup article asks some basic questions and raises some important cautions for organizations to consider before diving into social media; also provides some good uses of social media by nonprofits.
• “The social media helix and learning”–Describes how people learn how to use social media tools, providing a map to how to gradually get involved (The Bamboo Project Blog).
• “Manage your online reputation”–A LifeHacker post details how to use various social media tools to set up a profile for yourself; also applicable to organizations.