Category Archives: Personal

The price of focus

What a dif­fer­ence a year makes. This time last year, I had fin­ished an early pro­to­type of my pet pro­ject of an Irish-focused tech magazine and was shop­ping it around to poten­tial advert­isers, con­trib­ut­ors and part­ners. I had also suc­cess­fully con­vinced the best designer I know, Stew­art Curry, to be its design dir­ector. Just a …

September 24, 2012 – 20:48 | By martha | Posted in Personal | Tagged , | Comments (1)

Writing Elsewhere Around the Web

I took a short break from Tues­day News­day and reg­u­lar writ­ing here to do some guest posts recently. Below is a quick roundup of what I’ve been up to in terms of art­icles writ­ten, pod­casts and speak­ing engage­ments.   Design­ing Enga­ging and Enjoy­able Long-Form Read­ing Exper­i­ences – guest art­icle for Smash­ing Magazine This art­icle incor­por­ates …

March 17, 2012 – 18:39 | By martha | Posted in Personal, Speaking | Tagged , , | Comments Off

Daily Lessons from 2011

At the begin­ning of 2011, I made a res­ol­u­tion to note one new thing I learned every day. I stole it from this art­icle, which I loved: http://www.themorningnews.org/article/the-year-of-practical-thinking. I kept my list on tumblr here: http://thedailylesson.tumblr.com/. It was both easier and harder than I thought it would be. Easier because when you pay atten­tion, you’re …

January 13, 2012 – 22:49 | By martha | Posted in Personal | Tagged | Comments (1)

Quantified Self Europe Review

One of the first things I dis­covered this past week­end in Ams­ter­dam at the first ever Quan­ti­fied Self Europe con­fer­ence is that I clearly do a bad job explain­ing what QS is. When asked why I obsess­ively track things in my life like sleep pat­terns, exer­cise habits, food intake, skin con­di­tion, and oth­ers, I usu­ally …

November 29, 2011 – 00:58 | By martha | Posted in Personal | Tagged | Comments (8)

Transitioning From Working in an Office to Working From Home

There are many dif­fer­ent adjust­ments required when you move from work­ing in an office for someone else to work­ing from home by your­self. For me, one of the chal­lenges has been schedul­ing time to catch up with people.  While work­ing at Microsoft as an evan­gel­ist, part of my job involved meet­ing up with people, grabbing …

September 29, 2011 – 14:47 | By martha | Posted in Personal | Tagged , | Comments (1)

Getting Out of the Bubble

When you live and breathe one industry for most of your pro­fes­sional life, what hap­pens? Usu­ally you end up liv­ing in a bit of a bubble.  That bubble is rein­forced when your friends, peers and col­leagues are in the same industry.  This is dan­ger­ous because it changes your per­cep­tion of real­ity. I recently moved from …

March 11, 2011 – 17:08 | By martha | Posted in Personal, Technology | Comments Off

2011: Back to Work

Fun­em­ploy­ment is over.  I have work to do. I made the decision last sum­mer, when I was start­ing to look at new jobs, that I no longer wanted a full-time, all-consuming job.  I made a list of what I wanted, and it looked like this: — Time to work on my own pro­jects (2 days a week)- …

January 11, 2011 – 15:46 | By martha | Posted in Personal, Technology | Comments (3)

Funemployment

Fun­em­ploy­ment [fuhn-em–ploi–mənt] –noun :      The art of mak­ing unem­ploy­ment fun. Fun­em­ploy­ment took me from my return from Nepal and Tibet through the hol­i­day sea­son & new year.  I can’t recom­mend it enough.  Up until this break, I haven’t ever not worked since I was about 16. You know those pro­jects that build up?  Some­times they’re silly …

January 11, 2011 – 15:44 | By martha | Posted in Personal | Comments Off

Leaving the ‘Soft

Nine-and-a-half years is a long time to spend doing any­thing.  It never felt like that much time, because I did such wildly dif­fer­ent things at Microsoft.  From test­ing the object model of Inter­net Explorer as a col­lege intern to build­ing auto­ma­tion har­nesses for API test­ing of Win­dows Present­a­tion Found­a­tion to help­ing archi­tect and build the …

September 29, 2010 – 17:56 | By martha | Posted in Personal | Comments (5)