Five questions to ask yourself before you say 'yes'

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There's a big thing in librarianship about the importance of saying 'no'. On Twitter especially I see it discussed a lot (and I take part in those discussions sometimes): it's really, really hard to say no to exciting opportunities, or even, frankly, unexciting ones, for all sorts of reasons. But if you say yes to everything you can end up burnt out. So how do you strike the balance? Here are some useful questions to ask yourself when weighing up a decision. I'd be very interested if anyone wants to leave a comment offering more advice on this.

(ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM KLAXON: it's hard to write about saying no to CPD offers without it sounding like one big humblebrag. Oh man, all these people want me to do these cool things but I'm so busy doing cool things already! Nightmare!

That's not what this is intended to be so I hope it doesn't come across that way.)

Is this going to add to *MY* professional development specifically?

By which I mean, does it feed into your specific goals and interests, or does it fall into the category of 'generic CPD'? I think a lot of stuff we feel like we should do actually turns out not to be something we can USE in our professional development. Job applications in our profession are all about tailoring your experience and skills to the specific role being offered - there's little room, in most cases (not all) for general experiences which sound quite nice but won't be used in the job itself. So if you get asked to chair or take part in a conference panel on The Future of Libraries, for example, does that help you tick off an essential personal specification on a job application? If so, great; if not, even if the conference is prestigious, it might not actually turn out to mean much, in real terms, that you were on the panel.

So ask yourself, where do I want to go next? And does this thing I've been asked to do potentially help me get there, or not?

Do I have the emotional energy to throw myself into this?

I really put my all into each workshop I run or talk I give. It's not just the time spent preparing, it's the emotional energy of being 'on' all day, as an introvert. I can't do this 50 times a year, it would stop it being fun. So even if something is on the surface a really exciting opportunity, you have to ask yourself if you have enough in the tank to do it justice given the number of other things you may already be doing.

Where does this fit with my wider calendar?

This is so obvious, but easy to ignore. It's not just about whether there are things the day before or after the event you're being offered; it's more about your professional life-cycle. If you're coming to the end of a massive project on a Friday, chances are doing a talk the following Monday will cause you stress about both activities because you need the emotional space to focus on each one individually.

Are there big events in your personal life going on? Sometimes they can be all consuming and the last thing you need is to plan a talk. Other times planning a talk can be the escape you need.

Does this have the potential to lead to other exciting things?

Are you going to find a new or extended network, or audience, by taking this opportunity? Or is it a no-through-road in terms of what might happen next?

Sometimes it can be worth finding a way to say yes to something if you can see more opportunities opening up as a result - as long as those opportunities are specifically relevant to your interests and goals, of course. I wrote an entire book mostly for that exact reason - it was a nightmare to do, too... But worth it for the doors it opened. 

Is this something new, or more of the same?

One of the best ways to eliminate an opportunity which seems like it will be great but you know you simply don't have time to do, is to ask what it offers that nothing else does. And if, for all its excitingness, it's not going to introduce you to new people or force you to do research into an area you don't know as much about as you'd like or make you explore new ways of presenting, or whatever, that can be enough of a reason to say no.

I don't want to give the same talk over and over again. Laura Woods and I did that with the echo chamber thing back in 2010 / 2011 and we felt really spent after a while - even though we varied the content, we felt we'd said all we had to say. So we stopped saying it.

Bonus question: would it be fun?

I added this one after asking my friend Céline on Twitter what advice she'd give. As she says, "you're allowed to say yes to things just because they'd be fun" which is very, very true. Fun is important! Sometimes it can trump all of the considerations above, because a fun experience leaves you fizzing with energy and motivation.

Extra bonus question for white males

Something I've just started doing with conferences invites is finding out a little bit about the other speakers. I'm giving a Keynote at LIANZA in New Zealand this year, and I wanted to make sure it wasn't going to be the all-too-common library conference situation where all the keynotes are male and white. Thankfully that was definitely not the case for this event, they have it covered. 

I'm not trying to preach that if you're white and male like I am you should turn down your dream conference talk because the other two speakers are both white blokes too - but I do think it's important to ask the question and ensure the organisers have considered it.

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Of course, it's not just you who features in this equation, it's the people or body who are asking you to do something in the first place. If you can, as well doing the obvious helpful things like replying promptly, recommend someone else. If I know enough about the event from the description I've been given, I'll always try and match it with a name who I know would be great. Often the organisers are really pleased to have a new lead to pursue. 

It feels GREAT to say no. Knowing you're not adding additional pressure to your work-life balance. In my experience, opportunities still come up. It's not like saying no once forever puts the CPD genie back in the bottle.

There's a lot of rhetoric around the idea of being the best you can be, making the best of all the opportunities you have, and how you only regret the things you don't do. I can see the merit in all of that but I treat it all with caution. I keep a list of things I've said no to (partly because I want to show my employer that when I do ask to attend a conference in work time, it's for a good, considered reason, and not just  something I do at every opportunity) and honestly there's some pretty cool stuff on there which it would have been fun to be a part of. But I don't for a minute sit around wishing I'd said 'yes'. Because if I had, who knows how much I'd've been able to enjoy the things I DID agree to - maybe I would have been too busy to prepare properly (I HATE being under-prepared for a talk, even by a tiny amount) or I would have been so exhausted by All The Things that I wouldn't have truly enjoyed any of them.

So to maintain a healthy relationship between work, life, day job, CPD, creativity, energy reserves and all of that, learning to say no is a genuinely important skill. Don't always say no! But at least ask yourself some questions before you say yes...

NLPN Interview on what matters and what doesn't

I'm a big fan of the New Library Professionals Network (which is distinct from LISNPN, incidentally!) so I was very happy to answer a few questions for them on their blog.

You can read the whole interview here.

I enjoyed the perceptive questions and it allowed me to talk about some things I feel quite strongly about. The screen-shot below shows one such question, about whether awards really matter for career progression. They don't (in my experience) and nor should they.

New Professionals are my favourite library group and I don't really get to work with them much these days, so thank you NLPN for inviting me to be an interview subject!

Blogging to publicise research

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Yesterday I gave a talk to some Music Technology students about blogging. They're using blogs as part of their course, and I wanted to convince them to get the most out of the opportunity, and carry on after their Masters is done, because I think blogging is a fantastic thing.

I wanted the tips below to apply to anyone in academia who blogs, but hopefully also to libraries and librarians and other non-profits who want to get more out of it too.

This isn't the exact presentation I gave to the students - I've annotated it so it makes sense without me talking over the top of it. It covers building a readership, embedding multimedia, using the analytics, and a couple of other things too.

In case you're interested, here's a link to the Twitter Tips and Tricks post, of which there's a screen-shot in the presentation above.

Library comms are like tapas: lots of small elements make an effective whole

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A tweet from Matt Imrie alerted me to this blogpost from Scott Pack. It's about book reviewing and whether or not blogs about books make any difference to the sales of books.

It really resonated with me, because his conclusions mirror my own about library communication:

“...those sort of sales [from blog posts] combined WITH sales prompted by newspaper reviews AND other bloggers AND tweeters AND further word-of-mouth from people who subsequently read it COULD make a difference. Which is why we do need all sorts of book reviewing in all formats across all platforms.”

— Me & My Big Mouth blog

This is the absolute nub. No single method of communication carries THAT much weight on its own anymore - we live in a fragmented world and we have to adapt to that. Even compared with two or three years ago, there's less of a chance to use one platform to reach all the people. And crucially, even if it you DO reach all the people, seeing a message once is for the most part not enough to get people to do anything different to what they were going to do anyway.

We need to be nudged a number of times before we act.

Sometimes a library will set up a blog, and try really hard with it, and after 6 months be really disappointed that they're only getting 100 views for each post. But the thing is, it's a few people seeing messages from the Library AND on Twitter AND on a digital screen in the building which tips people over into thinking or acting differently. Click the little stats icon on any one of your library's tweets and be stunned at just how few people actually saw it. But that's okay too, because all of your communications channels combine into a holistic presence. It's about building ambient awareness rather than trying to hit loads of people with a one-off message and expecting that to produce a significant result.

It feels like you're doing a lot of work for not that much reward across a series of channels, but actually the reward comes from how they work together rather than individually. Which is why having a strategic approach to coordinate your messages and to know what each platform is really for, is ultimately worth the time it takes to prepare...

If you want an analogy, think of communication as being like tapas! No single dish is that significant on its own, but taken as a whole it's a really nice meal.

Marketing = this

#UXLibs 5 | Ideation, Pitching, and Responsive Study Space

My final post about the UXLibs Conference (see all five posts in one place, here) is about the pitch. It's also about the concept we came up with for the pitch, which I think is a genuinely useful idea...

At UXLibs we were all split into teams. Across the three days we had a specific aim:

Create a product, concept, or service that you could implement which increases awareness and use of library resources and services. Your proposal could solve a specific problem, offer an alternative approach, meet an unmet need, or completely re-imagine an existing service.

On the final day, we had to pitch our idea, Apprentice / Dragon's Den style, to Lord Priestner and his assistants

I was in Team Space Grey. Everyone was lovely. We initially found things hard going, ethnography-wise, because the library we'd been assigned simply didn't have any problems which needed solving. Our field work was showing happy students in a well used building. But when we did the 6-8-5 process of ideation, it all came together really well and there was a clear idea of what we should focus on, which was arrived at with everyone able to contribute and have their voice heard. 

In short, if I've understood it right, the 6-8-5 method involves a bunch of people (in our case there were 9 of us) having 5 minutes to each write 6 to 8 post-it notes with an idea on each one. So between us we had around 60 post-its after 5 minutes, which we talked through and then sorted into themes. Then you have another 5 minutes to do the same again, either honing existing ideas other people have mentioned, or your own, or creating something new based on the discussion. Eventually patterns emerge and a common-ground idea rises to the top.

Here are a bunch of our post-its, which we then arranged into themes:

After this process it was clear we were all thinking about transforming the basement of the college we'd been assigned, and from there we were able to come up with a really good concept.

Team Space Grey didn't make the final of the pitch-off, and it was basically my fault that we didn't do better because I made a fundamental error. An error which, a bit frustratingly, anyone who has been on one of my presentation skills workshops will have heard me banging on about not doing, at length.

(NB: I'm not saying we'd've got to the final if I hadn't made the mistake I'm about to describe, by the way; Blue Steel were ace and deserved to be there. Just that I prevented us from doing as good a job as we might have been able to...)

On Day 1 when we did the ethnographic field work but before we'd done any ideation, we really didn't have anything to pitch. The students simply didn't complain about problems for us to find solutions to. So when I woke up really early on Day 2 my mind was churning about the WAY to pitch, because I didn't know WHAT to pitch. I had this idea in my mind that we could use the iPad app Paper to draw our presentation in real time, because that somehow reflected the organic nature of ethnographic work whereas PowerPoint reflected the sterile nature of traditional data collection methods (like surveys). But no one could draw, so that ruled that out. Then I remembered VideoScribe, which I had on my iPad (although it no longer appears to be available as an app, sadly) - you give it pictures and it 'draws' them for you. It's great, and can hugely increase both engagement and data retention in audiences when used well. I got really excited about this and started to play around, putting in a heat map I'd made of where users were walking, and having the app draw them. It looked really good.

So I presented this to my team the next day. I very much hope I didn't steamroll anyone into it, and no one said 'I don't think we should use this', but I was probably so enthusiastic about it that no one wanted to protest! It was pretty cool. On Day 3 we used VideoScribe to make our presentation - never have I made so much in so little time, when it comes to presentation materials. We worked HARD. Below is an edited version of our presentation, adjusted to make more sense without us speaking over the top of it.

It looks nice, I think. It's certainly good as a video. But there was a fundamental problem with what we were then doing for the pitch at the conference.

After our pitch in the heats, on the way back to the main hall for the pitch Final, lots of people said nice things. Some people said we'd've got there vote, if they'd've had one. All of them asked about the tool, and how we made the presentation. It was generally agreed that VideoScribe was pretty brilliant.

Not one of them mentioned our concept.

(Ugh, I thought the above was important enough to need its own line. But I can't write single sentence paragraphs without feeling like Dan Brown. Still. At least I'm not writing whole sections in italics.)

I had committed an absolue cardinal sin of presenting: I'd let the tool become the content! I'd let the medium obscure - well, if not obscure the message exactly, certainly not allowed the message the room it needed to breathe. This became brutally clear to me when I watched the 3 finalists doing their pitches. Our pitch had drama and a twist, and a really engaging piece of software at its heart. But their pitches, all presented with nice slides, were all about the concepts and they had the time to explore them properly. I really wanted our presentation to stand-out, and it did, but not for the reasons which really counted in the context of the conference pitching competition...

So, apologies, Space Grey teammates. I'm convinced we could have done a lot more justice to our pretty brilliant concept if we'd just gone with a good old fashioned PowerPoint presentation. It was a good learning experience for me. Although, I have to say, when they announced Blue Steel as the winners of the heat, LeMurph and I did breath a sigh of relief that, after the most exhausting of conferences, we could finally stop, and just sit there and relax for the remainder of our time. But in future I'll be more careful to heed my own advice.

The winning pitch, from Purple Haze, was brilliant. It was great to hear David Jenkins speak - I'd heard he was fantastic at it, and he was. (As was Angus.) David's a natural - his enthusiasm and dynamicism energised me even though I was completely knackered! I'm very glad they won.

If you've watched the video above, I'd be interested to hear what you think of the Responsive Study Space idea. I reckon the basic principles - use ethnographic techniques to identify the dead space in your library, then convert that space into a study area which changes its nature according to where abouts you are in the academic year, based on student need - are pretty sound. The idea is that just as a Responsive Design website takes all the same elements and re-arranges them to be the best fit for the size of screen, Responsive Study Space takes the same elements of the room but maximises number of study spaces at Exam time, collaborative study spaces in term time, provides induction information in October and November, and so on depending on what your ethnography reveals. I really do think it's a good idea!

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(Header image copyright of the UXLibs photographer, jtilleyphotographic, used by permission. View the original on Flickr, here. It features me and various others voting for Purple Haze as the pitch-off champions!)