An Argument for Emoticons

Make Any Conversation Creepier!
Image found via Google :) 

I use a lot of smileys. All the time. Sure, I hold back when I'm writing to someone I don't know and want to make it sound official, but most of the time, it's emoticon central. And I think that it should be okay.
Around 90% of communication (ish) is nonverbal. We've created these tools to help compensate for the loss of facial expressions over text communication such as instant messaging, texts, and emails. Consider the difference when you read...

Yeah.
Yeah :)
Yeah ;)
Yeah :(
Yeah -_-

I don't know about you, but I read those all differently -- something is lost without emoticons.
It's also a matter of efficiency. Why should I have to say, "This looks like a fun project and I'll get started right away," when I could say, "I'll start on this right away :)". Same point, more efficient. And business (and Generation X in general) is all about efficiency.
As a writer, I'm not saying you should depend on emoticons. If you have the time to effectively and efficiently convey your emotions and your tone through words, you should. However, I know that I hate receiving novel-length emails, and I especially dislike overly lengthy texts when a point could have been made in a few sentences.
I think we all know enough to avoid these shenanigans: "send pix of ur car!! :) :)" My mom texts like that sometimes, no joke. So aim for the happy medium -- emoticons can add meaning to conversations just like smiling while you're talking can.

Posting Regularly

So, one of the biggest tips for bloggers is to post regularly (or not, depending on who you ask).

Posting regularly here is a bit harder than I thought it would be (although I'm not sure I really gave it a whole lot of thought), so I'm going to do a bit of an experiment to try and find the best way to get me to post once a week. I have 3 weeks of school left, so this part will have to be short term to account for variability in my busyness. I can repeat it after finals/Thanksgiving week with the attempt to make it more long term and a little more accurate.

Strategy #1: Have a set time to post
Monday and Wednesday nights after school/cheer practice, so around 5 and 8 respectively.

Strategy #2: Post whenever I feel like I have time/when inspiration hits.
(Or in between episodes of Torchwood, more likely).

Strategy #3: ...Yeah, I can't think of a 3rd strategy. I'll update when I think of one (or on Monday or Wednesday, depending).

In the mean time, here are some articles I found on the subject!

How to Post Regularly on your Blog…
How Often Should You Update Your Blog?
Why Should You Blog Regularly?

UPDATE
Strangely enough, so far Strategy #2 seems to work better for me, mainly because the week I tried #1, I seemed to be doing stuff during the scheduled time and then felt like I missed my opportunity to post... That being said, it was an inordinately busy week (week 10 at DU, the week before finals, the week everything is due, week of death, etc, etc). More than that though, I don't think I like having a scheduled time. Most of my day is very scheduled, so it's nice to have something that's not, and I think adhering to a strict schedule stifles my creativity (or maybe I'm just not all that inspired most of the time, so the chances of inspiration hitting at any given moment are kind of slim).

Stressed? Me too.

Ever have that feeling that you're trying to do six things at once and they all had to be done yesterday? Hint: that was a rhetorical question. Everyone's felt stressed because they were overloaded. Some advice I've gotten is to drop some things -- but I can't. Can't quit working, have to pay rent; can't quit school, it's school; can't quit cheering, I made a commitment to my teams. We've all been there, so here's some helpful advice I've found...

1. Take some time for yourself.

Make sure you're not giving up your "me time". If you're extroverted (you gain energy from being with people), hang out with some good friends or talk on the phone with someone (who won't add to your stress). If you're introverted, like me, and you have to recharge by being alone, take some time to step back from what you're doing and watch some TV or read a book (or some comics)... Take some time and relax. Find something that makes you laugh (laughing makes you healthier, right?).

You could also try these relaxation techniques from the Mayo Clinic. I'm terrible at meditating, so do what works for you.

2. Have a Game Plan

Prioritize which things need to get done when, and when you're going to have time to do them. I procrastinate like crazy, so at 2:00 in the morning when I'm trying to write three different papers I should have started ages ago, I'm really stressed (surprising, right?). Avoid that all together by spacing projects out as much as possible. Easier said than done, I know, but worth it in the end. And, since you have time because you didn't wait until the last minute, you can try the Pomodoro technique so you don't burnt out as fast. You could also check out this list of the top 50 apps for time management.

3. Get help

Professors can be pretty cool people. If you're overbooked and need an extension on something, most of the time it doesn't hurt to ask (as long as you ask reeeaaally nicely and ahead of time).

Because of the way my class schedule is this quarter, I'm supposed to take three finals on the same day. That just wouldn't work out super well, so I'm going to cut myself a break and get one of them moved.

Hope this helps! I'll try to post more tips as I find them.

Think Before You Tweet

This past weekend at DU, all of the students taking Intro to Business Law and Ethics had Ethics Boot Camp  an event that takes place Friday night and most of Saturday. There are speakers and activities to promote teamwork and integrity (like building a bicycle that one of your teammates races on and then it's donated to charity).
It just so happened that one of the professors was also a speaker (his name is Corey Ciocchetti), and on Saturday morning he was talking about excellent decisions. He proceeded to put up a list of tweets about Ethics Bootcamp that were less than flattering. Here's what he said: "It's your first amendment right to tweet what you want. It's my right to print them out and send them to admissions [to the business college]".
And to think, all of that could have been avoided by asking a simple question: "Who might read this?" You can tweet, post, and blog about what you want, but never assume that it is private.
Remember in kindergarden when you learned not to talk about people behind their backs, because everyone always finds out? At least when that happens you could try to deny what you said. On social media, there is a (mostly) public record of what has been said (13 million users said they had never set, or didn’t know about, Facebook’s privacy tools). You can't blame it on a glitch in your privacy settings, either.
Advice here? Keep it positive, vent to your friends and not to your followers, and think before you tweet.

Excel Tip of the Week 9/27

Sorry I missed last week's tip -- it's been a bit of a crazy week. Well, crazy month.

This week's tip is more of a guideline... if your computer is kind of old and doesn't have extra memory just hanging around, try and close as many applications and windows as possible before opening a big spreadsheet. From what I've heard, bigger than 10,000 rows is big. The one I was trying to open was 400,000 rows (hint: Excel really doesn't like spreadsheets that big), and I drew that Excel logo sticky note art while it was opening. The main guideline is actually to try and avoid really big spreadsheets; they're not a lot of fun and sometimes they send you nice error messages.

Networking is important, connecting is better.

Pic from the article -- generic, but it gets the point across.

I found this cool article Best Way to Introduce Yourself that I thought fit nicely with my post on meeting people on your first day of classes.
If you don't feel like reading it, the gist of it is that you don't want to introduce yourself with "Hi I'm Jacki, and this is why I'm awesome." It's better to keep it short, keep it in context, and "embrace understatement" -- as in be humble and focus on the other person. It's more fun to learn about people through having a conversation, so don't say everything about yourself upfront. Save that for your blog.

What's up with the new title?

Like the little description thing says, this blog is still under construction -- and I'm not gonna lie, its main purpose is to hold the domain name jackimasson.com until I really need it. Well, that and so I don't have to put a free email address on my fancy awesome business cards (it looks unprofessional).
So I hadn't decided on a title that I'd intended to stick with (bad pun, sorry), and I was looking around my desk/cube at work, and I took a second to wonder just how many sticky notes and junior legal pads I've gone through. I'm the sort of person who makes lists, and writes down everything that I don't want to forget. In addition to that, I use sticky notes as little doodle pads. They've become decoration to personalize this little space that I call my own. I write on them. I draw on them. I cover them with bright highlighter colors. They represent a coalescence of creativity and practicality, of the organized and the imaginative, of the right brain and the left. Am I reading too much into this? Probably, but there you have it.

Fact of the day: Post-it notes were invented by Art Fry.