I’ve been filled with a terrible ennui for the last few weeks, not just for blogging, but for pretty much everything work related. It’s been really frustrating me - I don’t like to be apathetic and grumpy about work all the time - and I couldn’t work out what was up. And then I thought about it a bit more, and realised that not only is it the end of the year, but I’ve also been at MPOW for a year now. It’s not the biggest milestone ever, but it’s enough that it’s been causing me to look back on the year and dwell on all the things I hadn’t achieved. Which is completely the wrong way to go about it.

So, in an attempt to spruce up my spirts, and try and get some perspective on the past year, I’ve been thinking about about what I’ve achieved this year, and what I’m thankful for (too late for Thanksgiving, I know, but as I don’t celebrate it anyway, I figure that any time is a good time to remember to be thankful).

This has been a good year for me – I have a lot to be proud of. I’ve achieved things that I didn’t think I would have, I started writing this blog, I’ve done awesome things at my work and for my career that I’m really happy about, I’ve learned things and changed things and been happy, and all in all I don’t really have very much to complain about.

Despite this, it’s really hard for me not to hit that wall at the end of the year though. It’s just in my nature. And it seems to be the time where everyone becomes frustrated and disgruntled, looking for changes that just haven’t happened. I’m trying to keep the good things in front of me, but it’s very hard not to focus on all of the things that I haven’t achieved, that haven’t been done yet, and that don’t look set to change anytime soon.

So how to keep my head above the water? Well, I’ve been reading lots of great and inspirational blogs – not library blogs, but career oriented blogs, mostly aimed at millennials/gen-y workers and the angst associated with it (a bit self-indulgent, I know, but educational and motivating at the same time). I’d recommend Modite, Employee Evolution, and Brazen Careerist (even when I want to yell at her for being difficult) as gen-y aimed blogs that help keep me focused on my goals, whilst also helping me be oriented as a young but (relatively) ambitious worker in an industry that it’s (relatively) difficult to be ambitious in. And blogs like Web Worker Daily, and ProBlogger Daily help my motivation to blog and be proactive – I don’t really want to blog as a career, but they make it sound so appealing! Surrounding myself with these positive examples really does help, even though it doesn’t seem like it some days.

How about you all? This time of year get you down? Any tips to share on beating that mid-winter, year-end ennui?

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Recently Librarian in Black had an interesting post regarding honesty and blogging about work. She came to the conclusion that there was no happy medium - honest blogging is both career suicide and honest sharing at the same time. And I rather agree with her.

This isn’t an issue we talk about a lot, but it has been coming up more and more recently. There has been some critique of the bibiloblogosphere, saying that we’re not critical enough, and that we don’t deal enough with contentious issues. There isn’t enough dissent and there isn’t enough discussion of what actually goes on in the workplace. And I think that this is an interesting issue to address.

I can’t help but think that this is (or should be) more of an issue with library blogs - we are, inherently blogging about work (you may be a librarian by vocation, but it is still ultimately a job), but everyone is still too scared to talk about the specifics of what we do. There is, as LiB said, too much of a fear of reprisal. It is, however, this fear of reprisal (and the reprisal itself) that I find disappointing and strange.

We’re not, by and large, a cantankerous or troll-y bunch. I can count the kerfuffles I’ve seen in the bibiloblogosphere nearly on one hand, nothing like the average of most internet communities (and even when there are slight dramas, they are very rarely on the scale of internet warfare seen elsewhere). We’re not likely to say things that are massively detrimental to the workplaces in which we work, or the people whom we work with. At worst, I expect we may be slightly snarky, and there may be a slight workplace politics hiccup following a potentially ‘difficult’ post, if there were any at all. And, essentially, we are librarians blogging for other librarians. Where we work within institutions, our non-library colleagues are very unlikely to see what we have written, even if we are well known within the library-blogging fold. And our library colleagues and peers are likely to be sympathetic to the workplace troubles and frustrations that we all share.

But, sadly, our workplaces tend to be unsupportive of this honesty and sharing. It is uncomfortable, and unfamiliar, and they don’t know what to do with it. They may approve of, or at least accept, blogging as an academic medium, in which we can wax lyrical about the state of the information profession, and where the industry may be heading, or as a forum for letting more interested people find out about interesting new tools and services. But they are uncomfortable with what I think of as business casual - the ability to be professional, and take your work seriously, whilst still being a separate person, with ideas and opinions that may not always align with what is best for the company. I see my role in this blog as a business casual role - this is something I do for myself; I love the reading, writing, and conversations that I get to participate in from being part of it, and I would be (and was) blogging in some other capacity if I didn’t have this blog. But this is also a professional venture - this is a way of meeting other professionals in my field, expanding on my knowledge of the sector, improving my skills, and, ultimately, being better at my job, and any future jobs I will hold.

It is this business casual idea that makes me understand why in other professions it doesn’t put you at a disadvantage to have a blog. In industries where it’s ok to wear business casual to work, it’s probably ok to be writing business casual as well - think advertising, design, consultancy, and other types of web work and bleeding-edge millenium industries.

And this is where I think the frustration lies. We are web-workers - we are sharing in the zeitgeist of new technology. We know what the most engaged minds of our generation are thinking and doing. We are using the tools that they are using, and sharing the thoughts that they are thinking. We engage in the same communities, and participate in the same practices. But we are not them. They work from without, while we work from within. They work in industries where free-thinking and opinions and open-ness are valued, whilst we still, by and large, work within large dinosaurs of organisations, unable to keep up with the changes, even when they would like to.

I can’t help but think that it’s somewhat unreasonable to expect bloggers to never hold, or at least express, a negative opinion about their workplace, but would indeed, if I were employer, rather than employee, relish and appreciate the honesty and personality of my employees being able to express such an opinion. But, at the same time, I know that it’s hard for our lumbering dinosaurs of organisations to keep up with the nimble leaps and jumps that modern webworkers make.

And I don’t know what the answer to this is. If we challenge the system we will get knocked back (note: my shocking absence on Twitter and Facebook during the working day at the moment). But if we don’t challenge the system we won’t change anything. Personally, I believe in pushing the rules as far as they will let me go and to hell with the consquences! What do you think?

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I have something to admit. It’s not a big secret, but it’s not something I’m terribly proud of. I’m a procrastinator. Through and through. Give me a task that needs to be done today, and I’ll think of some way to put it off til the last possible minute. If it needs doing by tomorrow, then chances are I won’t do it today. And worse than that, I have no attention span either. Something has to be hugely engaging to keep my attention, otherwise I’ll be wanting to do something else, be given new, different stimulus.

Now, this has always been a problem for me, and it’s something that’s only gotten worse over the last few years. I’ve always found the internet distracting (in the most glorious and wonderful of ways) and the slew of information available now sends me into such a tizzy of over-stimulation and attention deficit that I scarecely know where to look.

I want to fix this. I really do. It annoys me ever so much that I can scarcely focus on a task without wanting to quickly check my email or my rss feeds or twitter or a news site or whatever or whatever (the list of things that I can find distracting is near endless). But it’s hard. There’s so much out there to be distracted by, and I’m an information seeker by nature - I want to know all the new things that are happening in the world. But I need to be able to keep it in check, particularly when I have work to be doing. And sometimes it’s hard to find the willpower on my own.

In an attempt to deal with this, I’ve just started using the Leechblock extension for Firefox at work.

Now, I’m not meant to be using Firefox at work (shhh! don’t tell anyone!) - I use a copy of Portable Firefox on my flash drive - but I really do find it far easier to be productive with Firefox. There are so many extensions that make my browsing life easier and more productive, that being without them just makes my day far more frustrating than it needs to be. And tabbed browsing is a blessing when you’re looking at lots of articles and cases at once. (Actually, there was a whole good post in the Wall Street Journal last month about tips for getting around backwards IT policies to make your work day just a bit easier, but it wasn’t me that sent you if your IT department comes knocking).

But anyway. Leechblock is fabulous - you can give it a list of sites that you don’t want to be able to access (I go with the basic timewasters - Facebook, Bloglines, Flickr, stats sites), and give it exceptions for one’s that you do, and a list of times, and that’s it! You won’t be going there. You can even turn off the ability to access the edit screen during the times you’ve set, to remove that extra piece of temptation. There is also the option to set up multiple profiles, so you could have different settings for different situations.

This is a bit of a hardline approach (I have no willpower, I know!), and does rely on me pretending that IE isn’t on my desktop (but that’s ok, I don’t want to use IE anyway), but it does seem to help in putting a bit of a barrier between me and my procrastination.

Does anyone else have any good tricks for keeping the internet timewasters at bay when you have work to get done? I can’t be the only one fighting off the lure of the internets :)

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Ryan Healy had an interesting post last week on Brazen Careerist about work-life balance and independence. The general gist of it being that when we were in university we were taught (in theory) how to manage our own time - no one was making you go to class or study or party or sleep, or any of the things that needed to be done. It was up to the individual to produce the results at the end of the day. And if you didn’t hand your assignment in, or missed a valuable tidbit of info cause you didn’t go to class? Pretty much your own fault.

However, for some reason, within the corporate environment, it’s like we’re back in high school again. Have to be in at a certain time, couldn’t possibly leave twenty minutes early, need to be doing certain tasks at given times - the independence to choose our own tasks and own best ways of working has been taken away from us. There is a move though, towards a better way of working - what he refers to as the Results Oriented Work Environment - where it is not the hours that we are in front of our computers that are important, but the results that we turn in at the end of the day.

This is a really popular issue, particularly in the States, where this kind of flexible working (particularly for information workers) has really taken off.

Now, whilst I don’t agree with quite everything he’s saying (I don’t think it would be refreshing to not be able to distinguish at all between my working and non-working time - I like being able to turn off some of the time), I do think that work-life balance is something that is often overlooked within our sector. Unfortunately, though, we are fundamentally a customer service industry - someone needs to be here to man the reference desks and circulate journals and do all those other hands on jobs that need to be done.

In theory there’s no reason why I couldn’t work the reference desk from at home (even if it only was for a day or a morning a week). Most, if not all, of the resources I need are available online - I don’t need to be in the physical library space to answer queries. Indeed, as an information worker, I could be anywhere to do the majority of the tasks for my job. It would be nice just to have that flexibility. I don’t think a nine-to-five day is the best answer for me personally, and the way I best work - I’d love to have the option to time-shift and work an eleven-to-eight day, or work from home a few days a week. But most of my job works better with me being in the office - it’s good to have face time with our users, sometimes you just need that hard copy text, and our work is not so autonomous and web-based that we can get away with not being in at all.

Sadly though, I just don’t think that flexi-work in this kind of way is really practical for the library environment. As much as I’d like to work a time-shifted day, my lawyers are in the office from nine to five (well, give or take), so that’s when I need to be there too. And someone needs to be here to do all those physical tasks that need to be done. It’s great to see that other professional areas are taking up this idea, and that there is progressively being a move away from the traditional nine-to-five. It just isn’t something that is really practical for the library sector just yet (well, at least not for the corporate library sector, anyway). Or is it? Anyone out there with flexible working arrangements, teleworking, anything like that? I’d love to know how it works for you (even if it is just to wish and dream that I could do it too!)

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