I just attended the LavaCon Content Strategy Conference (for content professions, a.k.a. technical communicators, technical writers, and MANY more) for the first time ever, and it was like Christmas and my birthday all at once. I attended the Virtual Track from the comfort of my home, so I was not in Portland, Oregon. Thanks to the very professional setup and management, the conference was marvelous, and I loved it. The Virtual Track will go on my wish list for 2025 for sure. Only virtual because I want to avoid flying. My mind is still trying to wrap around where to begin summarising for my work colleagues. If pressed to tell you my top takeaways, here is what I’d say: 1. Accept our responsibility (our duty, even) to become AI literate and teach others and think hard about potential abuses. This is just one gem from Noz Urbina‘s profound talk entitled…
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At the TCUK15 conference this year, John Kearney and I gave a workshop covering some techniques for “Getting Things Done” as well as general productivity tips. All of this was aimed at helping our technical communicator peers get all the things done.
Prior to the conference, we sent out some optional homework.
- You can start by looking at Karen’s TCUK14 slides. Note the link on the last slide that goes to a bigger reference list on her website.
- That brings us to the second homework item: Reading about the science behind GTD.
- Think about a project (or the pile of stuff you need to do) that you can bring to the workshop. Having a real-life example to work with is ideal. You can bring it on an electronic device or in a notebook or just a few sheets of paper.
- Consider bringing a “GTD tool” with you to the workshop. A notebook and a pen is just fine. If you are bringing an electronic device, try downloading Evernote or OneNote. Both are free and very popular to use for organising tasks. We’ll use them to demonstrate GTD principles, but it’ll be up to you to find what tool or method works best for you. After all, you are the one getting things done! By the way, if you are already using a tool that you rather like, bring it along for a show-and-tell during the workshop.
The workshop slides are on SlideShare, which will please those of you who have asked for them. The rest of this blog post is the raw (and very long) script that we put together for structuring the workshop. It grew from our discussions and planning sessions on Skype, Google Docs, and Twitter DMs! Thank goodness for technology when two speakers live in two different countries! By the way, the script is not verbatim.
Comments closedI couldn’t turn down an opportunity to visit Krakow. A brand new city and country for me to visit. Yay! It involved attending (and speaking at) a technical communication conference. Mixing a conference and tourism is my geeky idea of a vacation. UA Europe is a technical communication conference held in different cities around Europe each year. This year, Krakow was host to the event. I flew in the night before the conference began (like, at midnight) and stayed on for 2 days for some sightseeing. The Technical Documentation Manager from my company attended the conference, too, so we split the session between us. This blog post is a summary of the talks I attended. The notes are lightly cleaned up raw scribbles. If I had any thought bubbles to share publicly, I include them here in square brackets. If I take time to edit these raw scribbles into a…
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