Results are in: Benefits of My Commute

Florida Public Transit is having a contest—share your story about riding the bus and win a television. It seemed like a good time to let you know how my commute experience has been going.

How I Got Religion about the Bus

I had expensive travel plans for the first half of 2010–my sister was having a destination wedding in Colorado in April and I had a professional conference two weeks after that. At the beginning of January, I started adding up the numbers in my budget—I had a car payment, full coverage with a good insurance company, and less than 14 miles to the gallon.

Unless I wanted to stop paying down my debt and put off contributing to my 401(k), I needed to change something. Now that I lived on a bus route, the car was my least essential fixed expense.

I had to think about what mattered to me. I had a shiny SUV with big tires and cold AC. I had the ability to jump in the car and run a single errand here or there anytime, to have my own cocoon of personal space on my ride to and from work. I had a digital compass in my rear-view mirror. I loved that compass.

But I wasn’t going to be able to have spending money on my sister’s wedding trip, or give her a present. I wasn’t going to be able to make it to an important industry conference and meet my online colleagues in person.

Family, travel, staying current in my field—I could have those things or I could have a nice car. So I sold the car. I decided that at the beginning of February. The vehicle was on Craigslist, I sold it, and bought a PSTA bus pass by the end of the following week.

I officiated at my sister’s wedding and tried snowboarding, too.

You Don’t have to Be a Birdwatcher, but Why Wouldn’t You Be?

Now’s the part where I elaborate on how my commuting experience has changed me. Let’s just compare my previous daily drive to my current bus route.

• I used to press snooze and then squeeze in last-minute items before work (emails, blog posts, dishes) until I made myself late. Then I worked late and ate drive-through food on the way home. Now, I have a window of opportunity to catch the bus, so I make it work. And I leave at the same time every night. The department doesn’t fall apart, and I have time for a run in the evening.
• I used to think about how late I was all the way to work. Now I read books. Last week I saw an adult eagle and two juvenile eagles flying loops together as I walked from the bus stop to my office building. Eagles!
• I used to waste time and gas by running errands inefficiently. Now I run errands on the one day of the week that I have the household car. Sometimes it’s a pain. Mostly it just isn’t.

All of the reasons I used to have for “needing” my own car were just self-indulgent. My friends in cities like Chicago and New York get along without them, at least for a while, while they are starting out in their careers. People in less developed countries get by sharing vehicles, using bikes, or commuting. I like the feeling of knowing I no longer have that false dependence on a vehicle. I feel like I have a more balanced, realistic idea of what is a need versus a luxury.

Previously, on this Blog

I want everyone to take the bus. Of course, it helps the environment, but the adjustment to my previous habits has also done me good. Plus, the more people that ride, the more resources PSTA will have to improve the experience.

But I have also shared some of my frustrations adjusting to the commute on my blog and on Twitter. I posted examples that I thought were off-putting to discretionary riders, and recommendations on gear for commuters. I’m not shy, and I like to improve things. So I chronicle.

And PSTA has been responsive. Bob Lasher in Marketing posted relevant stats and other information on my blog. I registered two comments online using their form and got responses within hours. They’ve since launched a Twitter account and a LinkedIn group. I’m not sure what it will take to make bus commutes more mainstream in the Tampa Bay Area, but I do think PSTA is going to try and find out.

Doing the Stop-and-Think

Miscellaneous Sources

Penelope Trunk has written several posts about asking good questions. One of them was about not asking the direct question you want to ask, but asking something else. Don’t ask for a date, but make small talk. Actually, the post is about negotiating, but negotiating is a form of asking.

This has been rattling around in my head lately, because I have been attacking this problem of career advancement head on for so long now, with such slow success. I’ve worked methodically on my soft skills, and my core skills, and I at least know what technical skills I need to develop, even though I don’t get to practice them at my job.

I love meeting people in STC and other places, so my network is growing all the time, and I can’t help myself but to learn more about writing and taxonomies and all things information—I’m moving in the right direction. But so much of this worry about salaries and projects and poker faces has been so joyless. Where is the charmed success I used to enjoy before I got into the work world? I think I mistakenly left something behind in my rush to be a serious grown up.

One of my current favorite bands, Mew, write songs inspired by dreams. Their music is technically complex, and each song is a coherent composition with a definite mood or idea. It seems like they achieve these successful songs by this indirect, intuitive approach.

What should I be asking myself about work? What approach is both intuitive and strategic? What feels more like me and not like some desperately-applied career advice?

What I want to ask myself is, “Can I even be happy as an employee anymore? What if I actually got paid enough that money wasn’t such an issue anymore? Don’t I want to live in a bigger city at some point in my life? How can I be a snowbird between Chicago and St. Pete before I retire?” I haven’t decided whether those are exactly the things I should be asking myself, though, or if those questions are way too obvious.

These People Give Me Hope

Ben Minson blogged about how being a technical writer for his church has given his work extra meaning. A couple of people have suggested to me recently that branching out and adding more skills would take the edge off. Seth Godin and Gina Trapani have advised to think in terms of ultimate outcomes, rather than piddly projects. This is all helping me, but also bringing some difficult decisions to the surface, as I admit to myself that some of my projects and priorities conflict with each other. Good thing I’m reading The Dip, a book about when to quit and when not to. Yeesh.

In his recent interview with Penelope Trunk, Godin recommended looking at people whose gigs you want and finding out how they got those gigs. Here’s a list of people whose gigs I want:

• Amy Goodman – The quality, consistency, and fearlessness of her work amazes me.
• Penelope Trunk – It has helped me to read such candid posts–I don’t know if she thinks of it this way, but I consider it to be a very giving thing. And I love the idea of not wasting so much time figuring out what not to share.
• Rahel Bailie – I’m quite interested in content strategy, and I admire her ability to sell it as a bottom-line necessity.
• Ira Glass – This American Life is well-done, long-running, and addictive.
• Sue Heltzel – My aunt is good at everything she decides to do, and she’s gotten herself to where she wanted to be – surrounded by grandbabies and working her own business.
• Paul Farmer – His work, bringing medical care to rural Haiti, has been beyond obsessed, for sure qualifying as out-of-balance. But how else do you accomplish something this big in Haiti?

There are other people I could list, many of them journalists. I am trying hard not to be so drawn to journalism.

Do the Stop-and-Think

The Dip has me asking myself—what can I be the very best at? I need to get very specific about this. I want to travel, work out my house, not sit at a desk the entire day, write, share information, and work on things I care deeply about. I want my own business, or a partnership with family or friends. But is that the smartest thing for right now?

So, I expect my immediate future to be filled with much sitting and thinking, and writing. As always, it helps me to talk to you all about it, too.

Give the Big Picture First

The Big H

During a recent business writing training at work, the instructor led us through an exercise on giving instructions. She had a man stand at the board with his back to the audience. Then she gave a woman in the audience a piece of paper with a big, block-letter H on it. The H had some sections shaded, and some patterned. The exercise was to describe the H so that the co-worker at the board could recreate it.

The woman started describing horizontal, vertical, and parallel rectangles. She jumped right into size and shape specifications, and we giggled as the drawing grew more and more misshapen. It would have helped, before giving specs, if she had said something like, “You’re going to be drawing a big H.”

How to Drive Me Crazy, Turn-by-Turn

A couple of weeks ago, my boyfriend and I were leaving an open house at my boss’s husband’s scooter shop, and I was driving. It’s only a few miles from my house, but I needed directions, so my boyfriend looked it up on his BlackBerry.

I just needed to know if I was headed in the right direction. I needed to get to a main road that I recognized and find out which way to turn on that road. He wanted to tell me to turn right on this side street, than left on that side street, step-by-step.

“Turn right on 4th St,” he said, peering at the BlackBerry’s tiny screen.
“And then what?”
“Turn right on 30th Ave.” He scrolled a little more.
“And then what?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No, you’re not getting another ‘then what.’” I think he was offended that I didn’t trust he was reading me the steps correctly, but that wasn’t it at all. I was distracted by the certainty that, really, it didn’t matter which road I turned on as long as I knew which general direction I was headed. Maybe I could pick a better street than this dinky side road that Google had selected for me.

After I pulled over and confiscated the BlackBerry, I got back on the same road going the same direction that I was on when he looked up the directions. I confirmed I was going the right way and memorized the list of streets I had to turn on. After that, I checked back in with him occasionally for details–to make sure I was turning the right way.

Yes, I was the kid that couldn’t do math until I understood why the formulas worked. Yes, I need the big picture first. Is that so unusual? Because it reminds me of our department’s new approach to writing task topics.

The Big Picture has a Template

We are going with a textbook implementation of structured authoring (task, concept, and reference topics), using a help-authoring tool to manage the content, rather than DITA or a CMS.

We already had a format that specified where to include procedures and where to include window descriptions. That put us ahead of some other shops in moving to structured authoring. But we had no official place for “what,” “why,” and “where,” or for reference information that wasn’t a window description. That type of information was stuffed in awkwardly and inconsistently, or left out completely. Our job now is to extract it and identify the gaps.

As we improve our content with this new format, our clients will be increasingly able to choose the correct “how,” the correct instructions, because they’ll have more of the big picture.

Writing my own Concept Topics

I have been asked, “Don’t you ever turn off?” (I do. It’s called Lost.) I have been told that I “live and breathe” tech comm (uncomfortable squirming). I have learned to slow my breathing and relax my hands during style discussions.

I am starting to wonder if tech comm warrants the energy I put into it.

Why learn markup languages? Why blog? Why earn the political capital, persist in getting around barriers to user research to learn which of our users are the ones who register patients, how much training they had, and which pages of the manual they have at their workstation, all the while operating under the probability that if it weren’t for the federal regulation that requires my deliverables I would be out the door? Is it really just because I like to problem-solve?

I have never been a person who is very motivated by fear of losing my job. Job preservation isn’t what’s lighting my fire.

I love the nature of the work—advocating for users, methodically studying their motivations, crafting and sorting content. I am tiring, though, of content about windows and buttons. I am reflexively competitive, and passionate, and creative. It’s time for me be more conscious about what I’m using that for. I don’t want to get to the end of my career and find that I’ve completed the equivalent of a big Rubik’s Cube.

Increasingly, I think tech comm is part of my “how.” I’ll be working on extracting my “why.” If it suits you, it would very much help me to hear about yours.

The OG Word. Also: Kill Your Darlings?

Sarah O’Keefe of Scriptorium posted a response to my post about whether we need STC. The post generated much discussion, some of it about whether STC has an “old guard” and a “new guard,” and whether STC, itself, is “old guard.” And now I am officially not typing either of those phrases again for at least six months. Sarah, good call on the lazy terminology.

When I wrote the post as a response to Tom Johnson’s post, I envisioned an empowered group resisting change partly because they benefit from the status quo, and because change is so hard, and because the leadership is already working hard on what they’ve decided is a priority. I was thinking of resistance and lack of agility in an organization, not in particular people.

I am thinking of my frustration at what feels like a same-old approach—top-down and disjointed. I am 100% sure this is not the result of a deficiency in the individuals in leadership, whatever their ages.

I understand what a year in survival mode looks like. We might as well have not had a Suncoast chapter planning meeting last year. I had no clear idea of how to convert the input into actual volunteers, and the president, treasurer, and I spent all our time just arranging for a roof and good speaker once a month.

That was enough to get us through the year and attract a dynamite nominations guy, who in turn recruited us a full admin council for this year. But if you want to talk about why our web site is in appalling condition, I might not have much patience for you. We haven’t gotten that far yet, that’s why.

If the Society is resuming other iniatives now, though, why not take more input about which ones we’d like to see? Why not test prototypes of the new social platform on us? There may be good reasons why I haven’t seen that. What might those reasons be?

STC is a 501(c)3, as discussed in Leadership Day. So the Society is supposed to benefit the profession rather than directly benefiting the members. With that in mind, when I suggest regional conferences, I’m suggesting regional conferences that take organizational effort and dollars from the Society, not from the chapters. There might be ways to do this without losing quality in the areas that matter most to members. I would happily lose the recording of sessions, for example, in exchange for wifi.

Aaargh, the wifi!(Shakes fist at sky.) I’m using an easy example here. But seriously, how about polling us about which parts of a conference are important to us? I don’t want to be asked to pay a higher registration fee until I’m convinced that we’ve put the work into finding out what everyone wants in a conference now. There were evaluation sheets for sessions this year. If you attended the full conference. I went to a workshop, and there’s no form for that. Never mind the people who didn’t go at all.

I think we have the same issue with the people who decided that after how-ever-many years, STC wasn’t for them. Yes, you get what you put into it. But sometimes people need help figuring out what to put in. I’m reminded of a phrase I hate: “user error.”

Do we really have no leverage to negotiate with the Hyatt? What if we had a super low-budget conference somewhere else next year just to boycott them; just to show them we meant business? It worries me to think that the Society is not light enough on its feet to pull something like that off. Am I mistaken in this perception?

I understand that it’s not as easy for vendors as a single conference would be. It’s easier for thousands of members, though. What’s the balance of the two that benefits the profession?

Dueling Pianos: Do We Need STC?

During the STC 2010 conference, tech comm blogger Tom Johnson interviewed attendees and presenters between sessions, and he’s been uploading those videos to his site.

I picked two to watch consecutively: his interview with usability consultant Whitney Hess; then his discussion with Char James-Tanny and Bill Swallow about the pay-for-content model for online content. Although the two talks were not strictly on the same topic, I think they each provided insight on where STC can improve and why it’s not irrelevant, yet (in my humble estimation).

Johnson’s questions to Hess were about the “old guard,” the generation who established and defined our field, vs. the “new guard,” the emerging generation that is perhaps more comfortable with social media and other new methods. Hess suggested that the old guard will make themselves irrelevant, and that the new folk should go around unnecessary barriers set up by them. She raised the question of whether we need such formal associations as STC.

In the Tanny/ Swallow interview, Johnson asked for their thoughts on the pay-for-content model: can it work and does it have value online, where so much can be obtained for free? Both suggested that exclusive, vetted content can be worth paying for online.

I think that the reasons why paid online content makes sense in some cases are the some of the same reasons that STC and its conference make sense: the exclusivity, the curation, and the vetting add value to the association, as well.

1. The formality of the association adds to employer perceptions of us, and having STC associated with a webinar or class I want to get paid for makes it much more likely to get approved. I’ll venture a guess that this is more valuable to some of us than others. There are many consultants in STC, but meanwhile, I’m still finagling invitations to the right meetings at my job.
2. I think our publications are excellent. For a long time, they were one of the biggest benefits of my membership.
3. Speaking of quality products like our publications, there is something to be said for the level of planning that goes into our activities. The TCBoK has a 15-page charter. I don’t think that’s too much for a project of that magnitude, and it’s a good precedent for our work projects. Not everything is a complex project that needs that level of planning, but it’s a skill to know the difference.
4. Chapter meetings have been enormously beneficial, and the same goes for the conferences: the programs get a 90ish % from me, overall, and the people I’ve met have given me an education in tech comm. I think I wouldn’t get that depth of knowledge if all of tech comm was an un-conference with people my age.
5. The organization is sandbox for the work world and a place to prove ourselves. We get to practice audience analysis, and UX, and web development, and everything else by serving this community. Not to mention selling books to it, in some cases. But . . .

I absolutely think we need to cut the unnecessary trappings fast. Bylaws: why are they pages upon pages? It’s intimidating and unusable, and it dates us. No wifi? Unacceptable—cut something else, period. A new, monolithic social platform for all members? Where was my survey? And maybe it’s time to start thinking about funding more regional conferences with lighter footprints rather than one, large conference. If the TCBoK will be paid content, why are we holding our hands out for content like we’re taking charity?

We’ve got to have more of these discussions at the Suncoast chapter level, so don’t think I’m leaving myself out of this. For example, I got some (gentle) criticism about having a fancy catered dinner at the Doubletree for our competition awards banquet, and then handing out paper certificates (with professional graphics, thanks very much) to the winners. In past years we had fancier plaques. I’m still figuring out where to hang mine, but it sure is pretty.

Meanwhile, we have sizable minority of unemployed members, and you’ll find nary a developer at our meetings, even the ones about XML and content strategy. Nor do we venture out to represent STC at the dozens of dev-focused meetups in our area.

Hess’s point about our siloed professions was a good one. Our industry relies on tech, and it intermingles with the UX community, among others. For example, during the STC Usability and User Experience SIG meeting, I learned that it was a couple of STC folk who founded UPA (can’t find a link for this, unfortunately). I think we can take cues from some of the more tech-y conferences: partly to save money on things that are less important to the “new guard” (sorry, can’t type that without air quotes), like centerpieces and centralized, mega-conferences, and partly to facilitate cross-over, which can get everybody more jobs.

At the UUX business meeting, we identified some goals for this year that I think could be good for the Society, in general: finding our synergy with other communities: with the larger UX community, with other SIGs, with the TCBoK. Why do people join the STC and the SIGs and not other groups, or in addition to other groups? Are we a gateway into those other communities, a supplement to them, or do people need our particular focus on docs? Where do we fit in?