Sarah Doody
Last week I was in Florida and my flight back was on a horrible travel day. Storms had closed Atlanta airport for a long time. This meant that my flight was overbooked and so the boarding process was quite competitive as everyone tried to get overhead bin space before it all filled up.
Last week I gave you a two month wake up call. What did you decide to tackle before the end of the year? What projects or tasks have you been putting off? Don’t try and do everything you hoped to do in 2016. Start small. This week, choose just one thing you could focus on for the rest of November and try to make it happen.
I have a challenge for you this week. We have two months left in the year. Now, think back to the beginning of the year and try to remember all the things you said you were going to do, whether for work or pleasure. The purpose of this isn’t to depress you as you think about everything you didn’t do!! Instead, consider this your two-month wake up call.
This week I had a great conversation with a friend from elementary school. We’re both named Sarah. Both of our careers have led us down creative and design related paths. Not surprising given that we were the creators and editors of our elementary school newsletter – which also got us out of going to recess in the winter!
Welcome to 2016! This isn’t going to be a blog post about resolutions. The truth is, I don’t like resolutions. Most people make resolutions that are too big to achieve. Then they get discouraged and quit all together.
I love learning. Thanks to the Internet, learning has become a lot easier. The Internet gives anyone who’s an expert at something the ability to share their knowledge with anyone who finds them. But, a problem I often have is actually finding those great people to learn from.
There are so many “experts” online, that it’s hard to find the needles in the haystack and honestly, it’s downright frustrating sometimes!
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Last week, Business Insider reported that Barnes & Noble laid off a lot of people on its Nook hardware engineering team. If you’re not familiar, Nook is Barnes & Noble’s e-reader and intended to compete with Amazon’s Kindle. However, things didn’t turn out so well for Nook and in Q3 of 2013 it’s earnings were down 32% and made it the worst performing part of Barnes & Noble.
Barnes & Noble has been figuring out what to do and one route would be to change their focus from the hardware to just doing its own applications and digital distribution. Too bad for all those people who got Nook’s as gifts over the last few years.
This brings up an interesting problem though that eventually we all will face. How do we decide what devices to purchase? How do we know that the device or hardware we purchase today will still be around in three years? I think the reality is that we don’t. The world of technology hardware changes so fast that there’s no way to ensure that some amazing new device will see a long lifespan.Continue reading
Over the past few months, there’s been a lot of talk about the idea of taking a digital detox. Earlier this year, the word digital detox was even added to the Oxford dictionary. The Oxford definition is:
digital detox (n): a period of time during which a person refrains from using electronic devices such as smartphones or computers, regarded as an opportunity to reduce stress or focus on social interaction in the physical world: break free of your devices and go on a digital detox.
The notion of a digital detox is being embraced by the travel industry with many hotels offering digital detox packages where they will confiscate your tech devices upon checkin to the hotel to ensure you fully disconnect from your digital life. This summer, I learned that there are retreat centers and camps for adults that offer digital detox programs. In August, I tweeted my reaction to these Continue reading
In this week’s post on Getting Started In User Experience, I’m writing to you from lovely California. Give me the ocean or a mountain and I’m a happy girl!! I love to travel and one of the benefits of working for myself is that I can travel much more because I can work from anywhere.
Travel is great because it makes you break your current routine. It helps you slow time down and see things in a different lens. This is particularly true if you live in New York City. My grandmother used to ask me how life in the “the bubble” was. It’s true. NYC is a bubble … and I love it. But, it’s important to get away and remember what life is like for most people.Continue reading
What would happen if we all consciously chose to do things that matter — that are authentic, and though not always easy, represent what we stand for?
I can’t remember what site this is from (I found it years ago and have kept it in a text file in my archives), but this is an excerpt of an interview with Dave Eggers, a writer and philanthropist. Every now and then I read it, and am always inspired in a new way. I really hope it inspires you too.