Am I the only person out there who takes a step back every few months to observe how I’m starting my online and day decide what kind of changes I want to make?
If you haven’t ever done this, it can be very illuminating. Back in 2008, for example, when I was doing a lot of political activism, I looked where I was getting my news, and quickly discovered substantially more interesting and diverse perspectives.  More recently I’ve been focusing on writing Tales from the Net, and also laying the groundwork for a new startup and/or consulting gigs, so have been thinking a lot about how to adapt.
So here’s how I’m currently starting my online days. The order varies, and sometimes I leave some of these out, but it gives the basic idea. I’d love to hear what others think about this — or what you do.
- checking Facebook and Twitter to see if there’s anything I need to respond to — and what’s new with my friends. I’ve told people that’s the best way to contact me (my business card doesn’t even have an email address on it) so I want to be responsive
- looking at my Dreamwidth reading page, which follows a couple dozen people, blogs, and comics (including Liminal States and Tales from the Net as well as PrivacyActivism, GeekFeminism, Restructure, Zephoria, xkcd, Dilbert, etc.)
- checking Twitter for news, and retweeting interesting links. paper.li gives a nice summary of what the people I’m following are tweeting. I also have columns in Tweetdeck for the hashtags I’m interested in (#fem2, #woc, #diversitywin/#diversityfail, #privacy, etc.) and am just starting to use lists.
- checking my newest email account, where I’ve been pretty successful at keeping the inbox to near zero and get only a few messages a day.
- visiting HackerNews, which now fills the role for me Slashdot used to: seeing what’s interesting to techie guys. I check the front page and new stories, follow a couple of links, vote a few things up, and try to find a couple of things to comment — I’m trying to build a presence there, so am consciously working on my reputation.
- visiting BlackWeb 2.0, Pam’s House Blend, Racialicious, and/or Reappropriate (as well as the various sites in my reading list to check out comments). HN is overwhelmingly white male, so these are good antidotes 🙂
- at this point my brain’s pretty engaged, so I spend a little time writing a blog post or (more recently) a journal entry. In November, I’ll use this time to work on some fiction instead as part of NaNoWriMo.
- if I’m in the mood to procrastinate, I’ll check a few political sites (Marc Ambinder, Democratic Strategist, 538 (although it’s gotten a lot less interesting now that it’s at the NY Times)), Slashdot, Wired’s Threat Level and Epicenter, VentureBeat,
- and now I finally check my other email accounts to see if there’s stuff I have to deal with. which, alas, there usually is.
Your mileage presumably varies. Do tell!
jon
Image credit: Morning Mist by DaveKav via Flickr’s Creative Commons Search