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Wednesday, March 10, 2010
SXSW panel preview: ‘The Happiness Project’
Gretchen Rubin reads from ‘The Happiness Project’
4:30 p.m. Friday
Day Stage
Gretchen Rubin has heard the complaint that the Internet is no good for any of us, that it’s causing us to just sit tap-tapping at our computers instead of making real connections with real people.
Rubin doesn’t buy that. And her opinion is worth noting, because she wrote the book on happiness. Well, at least a very popular book on happiness. Rubin’s “The Happiness Project,” is the No. 3 book on the New York Times’ Hardcover Advice best-seller list. It’s based on her blog of the same name. In both, Rubin writes about test-driving various strategies for happiness. She’ll be reading from her book Friday afternoon South by Southwest Interactive.
Visiting SXSW (it’s her second year at the fest) makes her quite happy, and it’s part of the reason she doesn’t think the Internet is a joy-sapper. She relishes the opportunity the conference gives her to meet her virtual friends in person.
“I’m meeting people that I’ve never met before, but whom I feel like I know quite well,” she says. “I love that.”
While she loves the energy and innovation at the tech conference, Rubin is also a student of history. In her work, she often explores what writers and thinkers have said about happiness through the ages. She says that when she started the Happiness Project she expected to focus more on emerging research about happiness. She’s still fascinated by that science, but finds that the historical advice is more useful as a guide to living a happy life.
One of her blog’s most popular posts is a list of ideas for cheering up that writer Sydney Smith sent to a depressed friend in 1820. Most of its suggestions still feel relevant: “Be as much as you can in the open air without fatigue.” “Make the room where you commonly sit gay and pleasant.”
In fact, keeping your surroundings pleasant and orderly is one of the first subjects she talks about in her book, and it’s a subject that seems to particularly appeal to readers, she says.
“One of the things that’s been most striking is how much people mention that to me,” she says. “Physical, environmental order is huge for people.”
A messy coat closet might not seem like that big a deal in the grand scheme of things, but clutter and disorder weigh on us to a surprising degree, Rubin says.
“I think for most people outer order translates to inner calm,” Rubin says.
Of course, with the success of her book, Rubin is experiencing something a lot of people dream of us a source of happiness. So how does it really feel?
“There’s something in happiness called the arrival fallacy,” she says. It’s the belief that once you arrive at a certain destination — whether it’s marriage, a certain income level or a book publication — that you’ll be happy. “Usually, that arrival doesn’t make you as happy as you think it will. But I have to say, getting my book out there and have it resonate with a lot of people is really not disappointing me. It’s making me very happy. I’m not experiencing the arrival fallacy problem right now”
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SXSW panel preview: ‘Ten Strategies for Building Happy and High Performing Teams’
‘Ten Strategies for Building Happy and High Performing Teams’
3:30 p.m. Monday
Courtyard Rio Grande A
Could your workplace use an energy infusion? Beth Hallmark and Drew Scherz have ideas to try, whether you’re a supervisor of not. They’re presenting “Ten Strategies for Building Happy and High Performing Teams” on Monday. Hallmark is creative director for Public Outreach and Strategies at the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts. Scherz leads the Web team there. Their goal is to help you attract and keep good employees.
— Take a coffee break — together. Rounding up your co-workers for a trip to the coffeeshop across the street will do more than help you stay alert for the afternoon. It also strengthens your ties to each other, and that makes your team perform better, Scherz says. “Cohesion comes from knowing your other team members,” Hallmark says.
— Notice everyone. “Every person on your team matters,” Hallmark says. You know your quiet co-worker who does all the boring, day-to-day stuff without drawing much attention to himself? “That person deserves as much care and attention as anybody else on your team,” she says.
— Get to know your team. “Know what it is that people like most about a job,” Hallmark says. If someone has a particular interest, help her explore it by getting additional training. “As a leader, understanding what truly does make people happy in their job can make a critical difference,” she says.
— Don’t force people to fit a mold. “We celebrate differences; diversity is a strength,” Scherz says. “Everybody works his or her own way. We don’t try to make everybody the same.” That kind of acceptance takes a lot of stress out of your workplace and helps inspire great work, he adds.
— Set expectations high. “If you always expect little from somebody, that’s likely what you’re going to get,” Hallmark says. She and Scherz says most people want the chance to rise to the occasion. They find that the best employees like challenges and want to work hard — as long as they feel engaged. And you can help them feel engaged by offering the freedom they need to do the job and the feedback to help them see that they’re moving forward and doing something meaningful. It also helps to give people problems to solve, rather than just tasks to do, Hallmark says.
— Show a spirit of collaboration. Even if you’re not a manager, if you regularly do things like passing along praise or sharing knowledge you gained in a project that could also help your co-workers, you’ll be changing your workplace for the better, Hallmark and Scherz say.
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SXSW panel preview: ‘Your Online Identity After Death and Digital Wills’
“Your Online Identity After Death and Digital Wills”
3:30 p.m. March 16
8A, Austin Convention Center
What happens to your Web stuff when you die? Your blogs, your Tweets, your Flickr photos, your business documents that live in the cloud?
And, to ponder a slightly less ominous question, what happens to your Web stuff when services themselves die? What if the social media site that holds so many of your memories now goes the way of the floppy disk?
Corvida Raven has been thinking about and researching both of those aspects of Web mortality, and she’ll share what she’s found at SXSW Interactive on Tuesday during a Core Conversation called “Your Online Identity After Death and Digital Wills.”
“It’s an intense topic,” says Raven, who blogs about social media and Web technology at Shegeeks.net. Last year, Fast Company magazine named her to its list of The Most Influential Women in Technology.
Raven started exploring the topic as she thought about the long-term ramifications of working in the online world.
“This is where a lot of people are making money now,” she says, If you’re making a living from your blog, for example, you’ll probably want to protect it (and its associated e-mail account, Flickr pool, etc.) after you’re gone to make sure it keeps producing income for your family.
But doing business online is still a relatively new practice — and it’s a rapidly evolving one, Raven says.
“It’s such a new topic, and there’s really nothing concrete around it, so I’m looking forward to the discussion at South by Southwest,” she says.
Whether your Web presence is business, personal or both, just making sure that someone you trust knows where to find all your user names and passwords can make a huge difference for your survivors.
“You definitely want to make sure you have a record of your passwords that’s as up-to-date as possible,” Raven says. Also think about leaving your loved ones guidance on what you want to happen to your social media profiles and Web sites after your death: Do you want your blog deleted, or left as it was as a memorial to you?
Your survivors might run into a few more problems if they’re not able to log into your accounts, Raven says. Take e-mail. Providers have their own policies, Raven says, but for the most part they’ll give your family your e-mails after your passing (some may require proof of death). But they tend to be stricter about revealing passwords, Raven says.
“You can understand it,” Raven says. The companies’ concern comes because so many of us use the same passwords for everything from e-mail to credit-card Web sites. “It gives them access to a wider range of stuff that you may not have wanted them to have access to.”
If you want to take steps beyond leaving a list of user names and passwords for your loved ones, services like Legacy Locker (legacylocker.com) can help you set up beneficiaries to take over the accounts you specify, or you could even create your own document with a lawyer, Raven says.
Your memories “Death is also part of technology,” Raven says. Technologies change, with some services shutting down and new ones emerging to take their place. Raven says she was drawn to the question of how to make sure the memories we have stored with various sites survive, even if the sites themselves go away.
“My memories are not in photographs anymore,” she says “My memories are on Facebook, or my memories are being TwitPic’ed to the world. How will my kids be able to see this in the future? How will they be able to revisit my 20s the way I revisited my mom’s 20s through photo albums?”
The question led her to make some changes in her online habits.
“I’ve been a little more careful, and also more aware, of what I’m signing up for,” she says. Instead of service hopping, look for tools and sites that have a track record and should stick around for the long haul, she says.
Staying ahead of technological obsolescence is yet one more reason to back up the things that are most important to you, Raven says. She backs up her photos to CDs — she figures they’ll be around at least five more years and that there will be a good conversion option to whatever storage form comes next. “This is my own legacy that I want to make sure I have intact for my kids in the future,” she says.
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SXSW panel preview: ‘How I Lost My Job Through Twitter … Again’
‘How I Lost My Job Through Twitter … Again’
5 p.m. Monday
8A, Convention Center
Jeff Moriarty says he and co-presenter Austin Baker (both are with Sitewire in Tempe, Ariz.) have had their share of social-media controversies at work (if you go to this session, ask Moriarty about his infamous “Lord of the Rings” parody blog), and Moriarty says there’s a good chance you’ll follow in their footsteps someday.
It’s no secret that things we share on social media can get us into trouble. Maybe you call in sick for work — forgetting that your boss is your Facebook friend and saw your status update that you were downing beers at a concert.
Why do we keep making these social media slipups?
“I think it comes from social barriers we build up in our lives,” Moriarty says. We’re a different person with our spouse than we are with our co-workers, and a different person still with our parents. It’s not like we’re making these shifts consciously; they’re just an automatic part of life.
“It’s so natural that we don’t realize those walls aren’t there anymore,” Moriarty says. They’re dissolved by social media.
When we post on Facebook, for example, we’re in the mindset of sharing with friends. After all, we clicked a button that said each person we connect with there is a “friend.”
But, Moriarty says, we probably didn’t choose them very carefully.
“Not everybody on your friends list is someone you’d go hang out with for beers or tell your deepest, darkest secrets to,” he says. Maybe some of your “friends” are co-workers you don’t know well, or someone you just met at a conference. But they end up being privy to information about you that you might not share so readily in office conversation.
You can restore some of those social divisions by using Facebook’s group settings to control see who can see your posts. Maybe you meet people at networking events you don’t know well, but you want to stay in touch with them. You can alter your settings so that they only see limited amounts of information about you. You can even block work-related friends from seeing photos you’re tagged in — this is especially important because you don’t have control over when others tag you.
Moriarty thinks all companies need a social media policy to protect employees, and themselves.
“More companies are doing it, but (even) more should,” he says. Social media issues will come up in almost all companies, and they’re easier to handle when guidelines exist.
Addressing social media through a policy also gives companies a chance to train employees how to handle certain situations: Say you work at a coffeeshop and you see someone bashing your employer on social media. Is it OK to jump into the dispute? And do you have to ID yourself as an employee of the company if you do?
By the way, if your company doesn’t have a clear social media policy, Moriary advises staying out of situations like this. If you see your product getting flamed in social media, pass the word on to someone in the PR department.
“If they’re not being proactive, they’re going to be reactive” he says. “You don’t know what the trigger points are, and it’s really not worth it.”
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