If you were attending a conference, and specifically attending one of the sessions that was going to be covering “blogging”, what questions would you want answered?

No, I’m not being completely lazy, I already have a good outline of what I want to cover (why, what and how) but it’s always good to get some “pre-emptive feedback” as a colleague of mine once stated.

On the flip side, those of you who already blog, any pearls of wisdom? Any information you wished you’d known before you started?

I’ll be publishing my presentation at the same time as I take to the stage at the Technical Communication conference in September and will update it based on any questions or comments raised during my session.

After all, for me, one of the main reasons I blog, and read blogs, is to exchange ideas and knowledge. The conversation is the power and I’m really looking forward to transferring my thoughts from here (on this blog) to the conference and seeing how a ‘live audience’ reacts.

My current role is changing a bit, with some additional responsibilities being added, specifically around line management.

As such, I’ve been reading The One Minute Manager and have to admit it’s given me a lot to think about.

The basic principles are to instill any team members or staff with a simple structure in which they can operate by breaking down the main management tasks of praise, reprimand and goal settings, into one minute activities.

The one minute goal setting helps set, review, clarify and agree on (SMART) goals.

One minute praising and recognition makes sure you are rewarding people as soon as you spot a behaviour you want to encourage, which in turn help set the expectation of how they should behave.

And one minute redirection and reprimand ensures that any deviations from the expected behaviour are caught as soon as they happen, making sure it is clear that the behaviour isn’t acceptable, again setting the expectations of how you expect your staff to behave.

The book itself is told from the point of view of a young manager who is struggling to find his way. He visits a successful manager who slowly reveals all of the secrets of one minute management. It’s not a big book, just over a hundred pages, and it’s certainly not a dry read as you are following the story to see what the young manager will uncover next. Yes it can be a bit over the top on occasion but all of the points are well made.

If you manage a team, no matter how big or small, I’d recommend you pick up a copy as it will undoubtedly change the way you think about how you manage your team.

The One Minute Manager (from Amazon UK, currently less than £5.

BBC Radio 4 are broadcasting a 30 minute show on this topic.

Engineer Mark Miodownik presents an instruction manual on how to write an instruction manual, exploring the history and the future of product guides and how they chart our changing relationship with technology.

He looks at how product guides have changed over the centuries, from the very first examples, written by James Watt on his new ‘copying’ machine, to the latest Ikea pictograms.

In the first half of the 20th century, manuals not only described how to use your television, but also how to fix it. Now, the first few pages of any TV manual contain stern health and safety warnings about the dangers of tinkering inside the TV.

Mark travels to Yeovil to visit Mr Haynes, of Haynes car and motorcycle manuals, to ask whether people still need a manual to fix their vehicle. As our products get more sophisticated, is the instruction manual becoming extinct?

One to catch I think, hopefully it’ll be available afterwards online as well.

I am a paper junkie. I’m a whore for a nice caliper of paper, not too thick as to be card, not too thin as to be unsubstantial. I love the feel of paper, the rustle and rigidity that give way with a subtle movement. I love the sound of ink being laid down, the gentle drag as my hand loops and dots across the page.

Despite all the advances of modern technology, I don’t see this changing. In fact I’m such a slave to this way of thinking that I’ll often print off an email if it contains important information that I’ll need at some point in the next day or so.

As such I walk around with a notebook (A4 size, hard bound, company branded) stuffed with ‘important’ sheets of information, with said sheets usually adorn with numerous, equally important, scribbles and notes.

And of course there in lies the problem. As of yet computers cannot match the speed nor convenience of pen/pencil and paper.

It is then a short leap and a step to full on stationery porn. Lusting over Moleskin notepads, gushing over the smooth flow of ink from a Mont Blanc. I’m not quite there yet. Yet.

But what of paper in our profession? The last time I was involved with a print house was over 10 years ago (blimey), and these days whilst we still produce user manuals, they are in the now ubiquitous PDF format. Information these days is largely thought of in electronic terms, yet everyone I know prefers reading novels in ‘old fashioned’ print format.

And I guess that is the problem, whilst the main thing we consume and produce is electronically focussed, many of us are still looking to paper as the medium. Which, if you are a paper junkie like me, is a good and a bad thing.

But mostly bad.

Having been off work the past week, spending most of my time sleeping on the sofa (think I’m fighting off a virus), I’ve been pondering what I do and how I do it.

And I think I’m at that point in my career when experience plays a large part and, despite any processes that are in place, I have to agree with what Donna said.

I’m making it up.

Whilst that sounds like a very glib and unprofessional statement, it is probably true for you as well. Making it up is actually quite hard to do. It presumes that you have enough knowledge about who you are creating your information for, why they need it, how they want to access it, how you are going to get it, and how best to create it.

After that, no matter how much detail you try to plan to, you will end up making decisions on a day to day basis, sometimes they might contradict the plan but, with the knowledge you have, you will probably make the right call. More times than not, at least.

Anyway, that’s as far as I got with that train of thought. I’m off for a snooze.

A few weeks ago I mentioned that we were looking for a new way track our tasks. After checking out a few different applications and web applications, I think we have a solution.

The problem we have is that, whilst the bulk of the work is scheduled against a project plan, there are a myriad of smaller tasks and documentation changes that we need to track. These come in through various channels, our Support team, our ‘Core’ team (who maintain the latest stream of the product), and through our team inbox.

Previously we mirrored the development teams approach and used index cards and a BIG whiteboard but it wasn’t really working for us for a variety of reasons. So I spent a couple of days downloading task tracking applications, and hunting for a web-based application that might meet our needs.

There are many out there and the first thing I realised is that most of the are aimed at the project management set and are very date driven. Most of the tasks we wanted to track aren’t heavily date driven, and so are picked up as and when the team has a some spare time in the project plan.

One of the first applications I found was TeamWorkPM which seemed to fit our needs and then some. However it was still quite over-spec’d for what we had in mind so when I stumbled over No Kahuna it was soon apparent that I’d found a good match.

Importantly, No Kahuna is a task tracking application. Dates do not feature. You simply create a project, add project members, then start creating tasks. You can assign a task to a specific project member (or take it for yourself) and when it’s done, it’s marked as completed.

You can add comments to tasks, which is useful when some tasks may sit in the list for a while so you can build out a level of information for when they are finally actioned.

All very simple, it worked well enough in our short trial that I’m happy to shell out $7 a month to get a private project (not visible to the public). If you are looking for an online, lightweight task tracker, check out No Kahuna.