I was recently tagged to do a “Six things” blog post. I understand that the point is to be more real to your audience — get naked as it were — but with all due respect to my good friends who have done one of these, I think this idea embodies a lot of what’s wrong with blogging. As a writer, everything I write is biographical in some respect — but it’s not going to resonate with you, dear reader, unless you find something about yourself in there as well. Otherwise, I may as well tell you six things about my dog.

So I’m going to turn this thing inside out, and write six random things about you. You may be astonished at my profound insight, or you may roll your eyes and call me a pretentious dork. Either way, I’m going to have fun with this. So here we go.

Six Things About You

1. You’re a genius. There’s at least one thing that you’re brilliant at, something that no one else you know can do half as well. If you don’t know what that thing is, go find out.

2. You care. You don’t want to just pay the bills or get by. You want to give back, live the dream, do something meaningful with your life, all that stuff.

3. You’re distracted. You spend half the day answering emails and apologizing to people for not responding sooner. You follow 100 people you don’t know on Twitter. If it takes you ten seconds to read a post from each one — assuming there are no links to click on! — and each person posts several times a day… well, you do the math.

4. You’re on the fence. You don’t know if you’re good enough to succeed at doing what you’re really good at, so you go on devoting less mindshare to the things that could really make a difference — to yourself and others. But you do need to pay those bills, and you may even have a family to support. You’re afraid it would take too much work and time to do both right.

5. You’re a hypocrite. It’s OK, admit it. Everyone is. We can’t live up to our own standards, and that eats us up. Society loves to hate hypocrisy, so it’s easier not to even try.

6. You suck. There, I said it. Thanks to #3-5, you aren’t doing your best at whatever it is you’re great at. You’re probably using less than 50% of your potential, and you know it. You’re sometimes plagued by self-doubt. The people who are successful at doing what you want to do must have more talent, right?

Did I get it right?

Or did I tell you six things about me after all?

Instead of ending this with a list of six random bloggers I know, I’m going to “tag” six superstars whose ideas I ripped off who inspired the above, and stated those points much better than I could. If you’re looking for solutions to the dilemma presented herein, go check them out.

• Carolyn Burke
• Brian Clark
• Seth Godin
• Mur Lafferty
• Merlin Mann
• Kathy Sierra

If you have a blog of your own, you know what a CAPTCHA is; for the rest of you, you’ve probably cursed at more than one. CAPTCHAs are those garbled images of words that you must decipher on many web sites to prove that you’re a human and not an evil spamming robot. If you’re like me, you find them at least mildly annoying. Until now, anyway.

I stumbled across reCAPTCHA over the weekend. Most CAPTCHAs use random words to prove you’re human, but this one shows you images of actual scanned text. The text comes from books that the Internet Archive has scanned but not digitized. You get to do the digitizing yourself by typing in the word. If enough people complete enough CAPTCHAs on enough sites, pretty soon that adds up to a bunch of books archived for posterity.

I love this idea for several reasons. It’s crowdsourcing at its best. It’s also a perfect example of what 37signals calls judo: break a big task down into many small steps; better yet, take something negative and turn it into a positive. It’s a good cause that happens to be book-related.

When I saw there was a WordPress plugin available, I installed it right here for you all to try out. Now go help save the world.

Plus, I could use more commenters.

I hear a lot of writers talk about how they hate editing and would rather just churn out words. I may be closer to the other end of the spectrum. Most days I feel like a sculptor who finds the right rock and chips away everything that doesn’t look like a statue. I struggle with a blank sheet of paper; if something’s already written on it, I want to make it better. Is that just idea block? Do I not have enough practice at coming up with my own raw material? Or is that just who I am?

(Ed: three question marks and seven “I”s in one paragraph is far too much navelgazing. If you choose to read further, you have been warned.)

There are ways to trick myself into writing more and editing less. Like my typical writing attack, wherein I have no actual plan and just start banging on the keyboard (sometimes literally). Usually enough words end up on the page, and I can turn the shocked and indignant editor loose to find something I can cut out, fluff up and polish into a piece of… well, something. I force myself to program in much the same way, but it happens to require logical thought from the get-go. You don’t get very far just banging on the keyboard (and I have tried).

But maybe I don’t want to write more. Maybe I’d rather be an editor.

Take music. I can listen to a song in progress and figure out what it should sound like, but I can’t write music to save my life. Not that I’ve tried a whole lot.

If you asked me what my musical career of choice would be, I’d say producer. I love playing, but I don’t have enough technical talent to get by playing guitar and I can’t sing much. But I can put a stamp on a piece of music. I have strong opinions about which way the song should sound and I’ll tell you. It’s the same with a piece of writing. I can tell you what sucks about it and give you an idea to make it better. (Whether I’m right or not.)

So how do you try out editing? Do you find someone humble enough to practice on and hope you don’t kill a friendship with your red pen? I did some newsletter editing for AskSpace and really enjoyed it. Who wants to be next?

“I’m continually surprised that more companies aren’t willing to consider telecommuters, especially on the job board. My feeling is that you can’t trust the person you’re hiring to get the job done without being under your thumb, you’re probably not hiring the right person.” -From the Signal vs. Noise archives

Fact: I’m expecting my second child at the end of the month. My wife is happy at her job and our family is nearby.

Fact: Less than five people in Columbia, SC have ever heard the term Ruby on Rails. (OK, that’s not necessarily a fact, but it sure seems like one.)

Fact: There’s an amazing series of tubes that can connect me in realtime with pretty much anyone on the planet, anytime. Shoot, I even got me a cell phone and a Starbucks just around the corner.

Conclusion: A guy like me, with ten years’ experience building web applications for startups, on just about every platform that’s ever been buzzworthy, should be able to find someone to pay me to work remotely.

Wrong.

I’ve responded to ten or fifteen posts on the 37 Signals Job Board. The typical reply to my resume goes something like this:

“The resume looks great. Can we do a phone interview?”

“Hmm, 803, what area code is that?”

“So are you looking to relocate to (metro area X), or just anywhere?”

“You aren’t able to relocate? Well, thanks for your time.”

Rails is the best platform I’ve ever built a web application on. It’s the only one that I look forward to using. Before I spent quality time with it, I was ready to give up software development for good. I don’t want to use .NET or Visual Basic again, and I couldn’t work half as efficiently if I did. (Imagine seeing a job posting that read “Designer wanted. Must be proficient with MS Paint.”) Unfortunately, those are the only local job openings.

Relocation isn’t an option for me right now. A year from now, that may change, but that’s hardly the point.

37 Signals is a group of fairly smart and influential guys, half of whom are scattered around the globe. It’s their job board you’re advertising on. If telecommuting works for them, give me one good reason why it won’t work for your company.

I’ve attempted to manage my time using the Getting Things Done method for about a year. A cottage industry of GTD aids has sprung up, from the humble Hipster PDA to the fancy Tracks and everything in between. I’ve used Gmail, as outlined in Bryan’s whitepaper, for most of the previous year.

The big selling points of Gmail are:

• labeling
• search
• as a web application, it’s accessible anywhere
• your inbox doubles as your GTD inbox, which means that email message you need to answer is already in your GTD system as an action

I’ll let you read the paper for more details.

After a few months, the system started working against me. Gmail is not the fastest web application on the block, which made weekly reviews (a cornerstone of GTD) a pain. I’d click on all my project labels by rote, wait for the list to load, nod my head, and click on the next one. I wasn’t really processing much.

Your mileage may vary on this next point, but for me, it’s not such a great idea to mix my email and actions. I hated checking email because I’d see all the todos and feel swamped. I hated checking todos because I had to wade through spam and content to get to them. I setup rules to automate some of that, but I was always tweaking my rules in lieu of just Getting Stuff Done. Merlin remarked that your GTD system should be like your coffee cup; mine was a British roadster that lived in the shop (and I know a thing or two about that).

What did I do about it? You’ll have to wait for the next post, because this one has been sitting in my unfinished queue for way too long.

What have I been up to for the past month?

• I got sick of writing “I’m a big slacker” posts. No one wants to read those.

• Besides paying work (which I could use more of), vacation, and family time, I’ve been reading the Bible through, following World Cup soccer, and learning the game of go (research for a novel… at least that’s the excuse I use). What’s so interesting about soccer and go? They’re both incredibly elegant. Simple rules, endless possibilities. Americans may tell you that soccer is boring, but they aren’t paying attention to what happens between the scoring. Go is the one game the computers can’t beat us at.

• I haven’t opened my RSS reader in at least a month. If I open it, I’ll find thousands of headlines screaming “READ ME!” with no filter to screen out stuff I don’t care about (that’s why I miss SearchFox). There are feeds I really do want to follow, like Signal vs. Noise or 43 Folders, but even the good ones are gateways to massive time wastage. I’ll end up clicking through to another and another link. If I blow an afternoon on surfing in the interests of “catching up”, there will still be 2000 new headlines tomorrow. “Catching up” is a myth.

I don’t want to contribute to the noise, either. I hate the term “musings” that so many people attach to their blogs. If you ever catch me using it, quit reading. I haven’t had any thoughts that were original enough to post, or worthy of the time. I can’t seem to write a post without spending 30 minutes cleaning it up and messing with links. After I update my site, I have to go check everyone else’s to see if they’ve updated theirs… and, of course, leave a comment so they come back and check mine.

The problem with the blog format is the signal-to-noise ratio. It’s too easy for us digital kids, Generation Soundbite, to crank out (and consume) superficial “musings” like there was nothing else important to think about. I’m writing this post in a notebook. I wanted to avoid even the overhead of turning on the Powerbook and getting distracted from writing.

I got a new book light before vacation. It only really works with paperbacks (so I guess I need to spend even more money on the hardback version… brilliant marketing). So I went to the library in search of a decent paperback to take out of town. I stumbled over two classics I’d never read: East of Eden and Fahrenheit 451. I started the latter first because it’s shorter, and closer to my usual SF/fantasy light reading territory. In 451 (which I haven’t quite finished), books were banned, not because of any subversive or anti-establishment content, but because people just quit reading. Attention spans weren’t equipped to handle anything tougher than TV. Burning the books was just entertainment.

(There are some scary foreshadows of the reality TV trend, as well as people who walk around all day with earbuds or cell phones stuck to their ears.)

Our fascination with “musings” is like crying on TV. Ever notice how, since the whole reality thing started, even the news tries to catch people crying? It satisfies our craving for drama and spectacle, on the surface, anyway. It breaks down the fourth wall (between performer and audience). In 451, a character has TVs on three of her walls and begs her husband to install a fourth.

Am I Thoreau now? Maybe in some ways. I’ve already talked about the problems that come with being a sponge. Another one is the inability to discriminate. I don’t have the free time to chase every rabbit trail that I come across. Not if I want to progress as a writer, developer, husband, father. Not if I want to keep the buzzing out of my head.

So is the blog a distraction or an aid? It depends on how I use it. I can practice my writing fine without it. The blog is for peer review, conversation, and brand recognition. Eventually I need a portfolio to show off.

But. If I’m not writing — and I haven’t, really, in the past month — the blog is an irrelevant distraction. The writing needs to come first; if it does, the blog takes care of itself.

Or is this just another “I’m a big slacker” post?

Two items in my daily “gold” news feed that caught my eye:

• Say “No” to Average (Seth’s Blog)
  In which Seth Godin talks about working the edge of a market instead of the middle. Turning down the average requests, focusing on the unique and spectacular.
  

  “By turning down the average stuff and insisting on standing for something on the edge, he profits…. It’s really scary to turn down most (the average) of what comes your way and hold out for the remarkable opportunities.”

• Initiative (Daring Fireball)
  In which John Gruber decides to quit his day job and focus on making his blog the best it can be.
  He references a Steve Jobs quote:

  “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work… keep looking, and don’t settle.”

I don’t know if Godin and Gruber are coordinating with each other, but when two of my e-roes say the same thing on the same day, I listen.

Signal vs. Noise has (inadvertently? or not so much?) reminded us all of the pitfalls of doing research online. Jason asks readers’ opinions of LASIK surgery. The result? A tangled snarl of a comment thread. “It’s the best thing ever!” “You’ll burn your eyes out!” etc.

The bell curve gets turned upside down on the Web. The extreme negative and positive opinions are amplified by those who have an axe to grind or a horn to toot, while the silent majority just don’t take the time to share their stories.

Apologies to Seth Godin for the title of this post.

So I’m one step closer to my writing goals. I’m no longer a full-time software developer. That could change in the future, but for now it’s just me, my PowerBook, a Rails manual, and some freelance web projects. I left my day job on St. Patrick’s Day and have been crazy busy in the two-plus weeks since.

In theory, this should leave me with more time for this blog and other writing pursuits. But that hasn’t been the case until now. I have a month’s worth of errands to run. I’ve tried various combinations of playing stay-at-home dad, paying Grandma to babysit, and working at the corner coffee shop. I haven’t found the right balance yet. It’s nice to sit out on the porch, soak up the nice weather, and watch pollen collect on the screen. But my toddler yells “DADDY!!” and tries to bowl me over every time he remembers that I’m home.

I’ve also gotten excited about doing web work again. That’s bound to happen, I guess, when I’m doing it for me and not for my boss. The unfortunate side effect is that I’ve honestly been less excited about writing. Working on my own and learning Rails has become today’s shiny thing. That’s scary.

But.

When people ask “So what are you going to do now?” I still say that I want to be a writer, and I mean it, and feel guilty that I haven’t done more of it. I’ve spent most of this morning proving to the blogosphere that I still exist, and I’ve enjoyed it.

Things should settle down once I get into a routine with work, errands, and general time management. And that routine will include regular posts. You heard it here first.

Boy, did I need to read this last month.

Career coach Cathy Goodwin has ten tips for managing time during a career or other life change.

My favorite quote: “During the crucial stages of a life transition, you need to run on two tracks at once.”

Thanks to Curt at The Occupational Adventure for the link. Just the latest of many useful ideas to be found on his site.