Break the Calendar Mold

via dia-carta.com

This is a great looking app for breaking the mold of calendar design by turning it into a truly visual collection of all your appointments. Although this doesn't currently sync with your built in or cloud-based calendars, it's an interesting approach to the calendar and I'd love to see where it leads.

I think the advent of digital technology led to designers using metaphors familiar to everyone from the offline world. Sometimes they worked and sometimes they didn't. The calendar metaphor is one that has maintained it's design integrity through the years and many digital calendars look and act very much like offline calendars and planners.

Is calendar design in the digital space taken for granted? Many digital calendars use the same type of interface and vary their utility with added features and information syncing capabilities. But, is there a better way to manage our calendar lives? I think this app has some great thought behind it, even if it never catches on.

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AT-AT DAY AFTERNOON

This is fantastic!

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Coaching: What does your ideal career role look like?

I met with my coach a little over a week ago for my Intake Session. As I mentioned in my previous post on the subject, we discussed what I hoped to get out of the coaching relationship in key areas. The main item of interest for me is career. If you’re a personal friend, you know how much I sometimes struggle with all the options I have. 

 

Preparation for this session included several exercises which greatly helped me to scope out parameters to help me evaluate options more objectively. One of the exercises included some thinking around defining my ideal career role. I’m a big fan of mind mapping and created one to explore this task.

 

The key areas I examined in my ideal career role can help anyone clarify what makes them happy on the job.

• Projects - What kind of projects do you want to work on? Do you like to work independently or as part o a team? Do you like a firm project end better than ongoing endeavors? There’s a lot to think about on this one.
• People - This is easy. What kind of people do you want to work with?
• Environment - Think about the physical space you work in. Also, what about looking at the geographic area you may want to live in for that work. 
• Schedule - What does your ideal schedule look like?

 

The map below shows what I defined for my situation. What does yours look like?

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Great sculptural work using colored blocks of wood.

via blog.craftzine.com

This is reminiscent of sculpture made from legos, but I appreciate the natural format of wood used in these. Cool stuff!

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Working with a Personal Coach: First Step

I’ve decided to start working with a personal coach again. This coach isn’t the person you work with in the gym, pushing you to your physical limits to improve your physical health. This coach is someone I’ll work with to push myself in multiple areas of my life, including career, health, money and overall life satisfaction. Tough and probing questions focused on areas I want to improve will make me think of things in new ways or from a different perspective.

 

I say I’m working with a coach “again” because my first experience was a few years back. I worked with my coach to bring my interest in photography to a higher level and to start showing my work publicly. That experience led me to sell images for stock photography, participate in annual exhibits and develop a series of greeting cards with my images, soon to be announced.

 

The first step in this process is preparing for my Intake Session. This is my first official meeting with my coach to discuss 3-5 main areas of my life I want to improve, grow or clarify. I think we all have a few things in mind we’d like to work on with regards to our personal satisfaction in life. I’ve identified the following as my top 3:

 

1. Career: I think most people are looking for more career satisfaction. This has been an ongoing struggle of mine for a number of years. I’m successful in what I do and live well by its benefits, but I feel like I’m missing something. I want to define the internal unrest I feel, but haven’t been able to identify. Only then do I think I can move on to greater satisfaction in this area of my life.
2. Finance: I live comfortably and enjoy a nice life, but worry about finances in my retirement years. This has been concern of mine since before the financial collapse we’re all dealing with now. I chalk it up to a number of things and see a direct tie to any career goals I establish. Being tied to a career path because of the associated financial benefits prohibits you from moving on. I think many of us get stuck there.
3. Health: This is an obvious one. Who isn’t concerned with their health and want to be more physically fit. I have ideas around this for improvement, but making it an area of focus will help me be more accountable.

 

These 3 areas come as no surprise, but what I won’t get into here is the number of smaller associations within each area. Collectively, they create the feeling of unrest and change I experience in each area.

 

Coaching for me is a way to get unstuck, to move forward, to be happier in areas that have been status quo for some time. I don’t see coaching as a fix to something that’s broken, but a way to gain clarity and goals to even more happiness. 

 

 

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Blackhawks Rally in Chicago

I was fortunate to have a different perspective for today's big parade and rally to celebrate the Chicago Blackhawks Stanley Cup win. My current office is on the 20th floor and directly overlooked the parade route up Michigan Avenue. For once I thought ahead and brought my DSLR with me to work today and captured some shots of the event. From 20 floors up, everything is mostly a sea of red, which I found created interesting patterns of randomness held together with a common color theme. Because of my vantage point, and being 20 stories up, shooting through thick paned glass, I was not able to get a clear shot of the Stanley Cup as it came by.

Big congrats to the Hawks for bringing this to Chicago!

See the full gallery on posterous

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My spring tree in bloom photograph from Chicago Botanic Garden.

This tree photo has received so many wonderful compliments from my friends on Facebook that I thought I'd write a short post to share. This photo was taken with a Canon 40D while wandering the Chicago Botanic Garden a week ago. I was struck by the graphic lines and color blocks of the sky and hillside when I walked by and stopped to take the photo. The contrast of the deep, clear blue, fresh green grass and yellow buds of the tree felt like something out of a storybook when I saw it. As I periodically work on my photo collection to cull the excess and keyword the best, I realize how much I love trees. The love is more than as a subject of a photograph. I've always enjoyed being around trees and the various stages of life they share with the changing seasons. My photography collection definitely shows a variety of trees in images that feel happy like Spring in this photo, and other images which show strength and determination in the face of winter gales of Lake Michigan.

There could be a book or another notecard series coming from this realization!

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