Helen Mosher

Multimedia Storyteller and Digital Strategist

Helen

Information Overload

By Leave a Comment

An overflowing in-box is a sign that you’re not processing things into your organizational system efficiently.

(originally published at AdvisorToday.com, November 2006)

Whether you’re dealing with mail, email, voicemail, memos, forms, or any other physical or virtual “pile-able” materials, the best filing system in the world will not help you if you can’t get the information from that email, voicemail, etc., into those files.

So how do you get that information moving? Productivity consultant David Allen provides a comprehensive how-to in his best-selling book, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. He opens the book with the startling assertion that “it’s possible for a person to have an overwhelming number of things to do and still function productively with a clear head and a positive sense of relaxed control.”

That may sound too good to be true, but the key is using your in-box wisely. “If you want to go for the gold, what you need to do is get your in-box zeroed out every 24 to 48 hours—paper as well as electronic,” says Allen.

What does it all mean?
Information that comes into your in-box is staged until you can assign it meaning, Allen explains. “You have to consider what I call the mighty meaning of ‘might-mean,’” he says. “Everything you receive might be something useful, might be something funny, might be something cool, might be something you don’t need at all—but you can’t tell right away.”

Here are some tips to help you discover that meaning and get your in-box moving:

1. Set aside a time to go through your in-box. Remember, it’s a processing station, not a storage depot, so you should be clearing it out regularly. But emptying your in-box doesn’t require that you complete everything in it. Rather, your goal is to figure out what everything is and how you’re going to deal with it.

2. Handle it top to bottom. If you handle the top thing first, and diligently process each item until you get to the bottom, then you’ll have an empty in-box. Jumping around tends to make you want to put things back in your in-box, and that’s a no-no.

3. Ask the right questions. As you process your in-box, evaluate it using the following series of questions:

  • a. Is this something you need to keep or something you should throw away? If you can throw it away, do so immediately.
  • b. For things you need to keep, is it something you need to act on or information you need to store? If you’re going to store it, put it in the appropriate place immediately.
  • c. For things you need to act on, is it something you can do in less than two minutes or something that will take more time? If you can do it in two minutes, go ahead and do it. If you can’t, add it to your “to-do” list, or whatever system you have for reminding you of actions.

4. Know when to pile. Sometimes you need piles, notes Allen, so that you can visually connect with the problem or project you’re working on. But don’t let unprocessed piles stack up. If you have several stacks of things to deal with, process all of them with the same diligence.

5. Create a “tickler” file. If you have to submit a form by a certain date next year, where do you put the form? The tickler file! Use 12 monthly folders and 31 daily folders to create a perpetual filing system. You can arrange your longer-term tasks by filing them into these folders. Each morning, retrieve your action reminders so that you can complete everything on schedule. Every time you empty a daily or monthly folder, move it to the back of the bunch so it becomes “next month” or “next year.”

Keep it flowing
It takes practice and determination to manage your in-box, but once you master it, you won’t drop details. “Your in-box is really just a holding station,” says Allen, who also has a free e-newsletter packed with productivity tips available at his website, www.davidco.com. “As long as you’re going to see the bottom of it in a reasonable amount of time, you can throw anything in there and let your brain relax until you can get to it.”

Adventures in Nats fandom

By Leave a Comment

Last night I was honored to be invited to the Nats Clubhouse Social, a gathering of folks whose social media and blogging presence help the Nationals get more visibility. I’ve run a fan page for Jayson Werth on FB for 7 years, and was lamenting to a couple of people that I wasn’t sure what my next Nats social persona was going to be now that Jayson’s moved on. Fortunately, Nats pitcher Sean Doolittle was having none of that, and I got to joke around with him and his wife Eireann a bit. Proud to be a Nationals fan, and excited to be starting a new baseball project (to be announced!). In the meantime, I’m sure I’ll be blogging about baseball here a bit more now.

That time I gave a speech when I wasn’t yet in third grade

By Leave a Comment

People have often commented on how comfortable I am in speaking roles. Thing is, I have to know my material down pat.

What most people don’t know is that I gave my first speech when I was 8 years old.  I revisited this yesterday at Thanksgiving, spent with a friend. It turned out her dad had worked at the same place my dad had, though not at the same time.

In connecting these dots, I realized that one of the things that made me know what year my dad had left that organization was that it was the same year I had given my speech. In sharing this, I date myself. But it’s an important story. The speech I gave was about my dad.

You see, he has cerebral palsy, and that year he was working for the Commonwealth of Virginia in their office on developmental disabilities.  There wasn’t an ADA back in those days, and my dad faced a lot of discrimination. So it was no small thing to be a rising third-grader, standing up in front of a conference of 300 people convening to talk about disabilities and tell them that my dad was awesome.

We cheered with him when the ADA was passed but we still have a long way to go with regard to seeing people for who they are rather than what condition or disability they have.

My dad still is no different from any other dad. 

Save that Dance for Temple University Libraries Latest Archive

By Leave a Comment

PHILADELPHIA, MAY 23, 2002

GRANT HELPS LIBRARY RECORD DANCE HISTORY

If dance is poetry in motion, shouldn’t it be in a library?

It is now, thanks to the efforts of Mary Edsall, curator of the new Philadelphia Dance Collection at Temple (PDCAT), a collaborative effort of the University Libraries, the dance department at the Esther Boyer College of Music, and the local and regional dance community at large.

Established in 2001, PDCAT will document and preserve the history of Philadelphia dance and its contribution to the region’s culture.

“I spent two years working in the community, locating materials, talking with people and finding out if there was a need [for a dance collection], and there was,” said Edsall, a doctoral candidate in dance. “Our mission is preservation, documentation and artist education.”

The collection includes posters, playbills, programs, business records, sound recordings, press files, videotape and photographs. Dance itself is ephemeral, Edsall said, but through recordings and documentation, the collection allows people to study the history of dance through more than just the performance.

“It really runs the gamut. We might even want to get architectural and set designs; it’s interesting from a research point of view to see how people redesign spaces,” Edsall said. “Costume designs are works of art in themselves.

Edsall emphasized that PDCAT was going to be a very active archive. It is housed currently at Paley Library, as part of the University Libraries’ special collections department. Among the collections that have already been acquired are archives of Philadelphia Ballet, Philadanco, the Philadelphia Dance Alliance, the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, and Group Motion Dance Company.

“This is not a cellar-based collection that we found in someone’s basement and we’re just going to let gather dust,” said Edsall, formerly a curator of Harvard’s theater collection and a dance archivist at the Library of Congress. “With my experience, I have seen a lot of what works and doesn’t work. That’s invaluable to me as we’ve tried to build a collection here, so that we can create something that is unique for Philadelphia.”

Edsall’s devotion to Philadelphia dance comes from her background as an undergraduate at Stockton College in southern New Jersey. Despite being surrounded by teachers from New York (where she went to get her master’s degree, at Columbia). some of her fondest dance memories come from Philly. “I saw dance in Philadelphia all through the 1980s,” Edsall said. “I had an emotional connection with the city. Some of the first avant-garde I saw was here at the Painted Bride.”

One of Edsall’s first dance teachers at Stockton impressed upon her that there was a need to start collecting stories and records to document not only dance but also the lives of the dancers. That teacher later died of AIDS, she said. “We were losing the first generation of American modern dancers through natural causes, and then we were losing a whole separate tree ring to AIDS. That’s when I decided this is what I was going to do.”

Edsall holds a second master’s degree in library science from the University of Maryland, as well, which makes her the perfect curator of the library collection, according to University Librarian Maureen Pastine. “She has built quite a reputation in the field,” Pastine said. “Because of Mary’s expertise, she will be able to equip our staff to do the cataloging and eventual digitizing of visual archives, something very important in the world of dance.”

Edsall was likewise thrilled when Temple Libraries agreed to host PDCAT. “They didn’t only agree to host it, they were excited about it,” she said, “It belongs here.”

Temple is the natural home for the collection. The Esther Boyer College has one of only four doctoral dance programs in the country, and the University Libraries have experience dealing with Philadelphia-specific collections with its urban archives department. “This partnership is an exemplary model in which artists’ work becomes the basis for artistic production, research and community Pride,” said Luke Kahlich, dance department chair.

PDCAT was recently awarded a $30,000 grant from the Delmas Foundation and a $77,000 grant from Dance Advance, a program funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. These grants will help fund the curator position and facilitate the video documentation of several important local dancers. Other fundraising efforts are ongoing.

Edsall noted that the PDCAT would prove useful to dance students who wish to recreate or trace the history of particular ballets, for instance. Changes in choreography and style analysis are as much a part of dance research as is chronicling dance history.

“This collection belongs to everybody,” Edsall said. “This is a lifelong effort–as long as people dance, there will be the dance archive.”

Originally published May 23, 2002 in Temple Times. It was a commencement feature, running a bit longer than a normal Temple Times feature. Reprinted with permission.