The Other Dave Cameron

Category: blog

  • Finishing the Shark

    The most productive part of the last Wednesday of February may have been the two hours at the end of the afternoon I spent outside of the office with a few first-year students, carving a great white shark out of a pile of snow.

    SnowShark-Instagram

    I’ve been working with most of the students involved throughout the academic year as part of the First-Year Residential Experience program at our college. Teamed up with an RA in one particular residence hall, I help create special events and activities about once a month for students, generally around a core-curricular theme of “Inquiry, Innovation, and Imagination.”

    This particular day, I was challenging them to bring innovation and imagination to snow sculpting, because we’ve had a couple feet of the stuff lying around campus for weeks. I supplied hot chocolate and hot cider. It was a sunny day, making it feel a lot warmer than the 14 F degrees it probably was.

    We had fun. And these students kind of blew my mind. I mean, of all the things I could have expected to see sculpted in the snow by the end of this activity, a great white shark rising up out of the ground would have never occurred to me.

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  • How Nice People Leave

    sunset_road

    We’re losing a valuable member of our team at the office today, and it sucks.

    Well, it sucks for us anyway – not for her. She’s leaving to get married, returning to her home state with her new husband, and returning to the job she left when she came to work with us. That’s right–she’s so good at what she does that her old employer was happy to make room for her to return. In other words, she’s going to miss us too, but she’s not going to be hurting for career opportunities.

    We’re all very happy for her, obviously. It’s exciting to see a talented person embark on a new chapter of their life, seizing an opportunity and going for it. And it’s not all that unusual, really. Staffing turnovers are just another part of the landscape even in higher ed marketing offices like ours. I can think of a dozen people who have left our team for one reason or another during the nearly five years I’ve been in my job. And we’ve had just as many new people join the team in that time, including the one who’s leaving today.

    But her departure stands out to me because she is going out with the most awesome courtesy and professionalism anyone could have hoped for, going above and beyond anything I’ve seen before to be absolutely sure we know as much as possible about how she did her job and that we’ll have the tools and resources we need to help us continue the work she started.

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  • Deflated

    Super Bowl game balls waiting to be laced and inflated
    Via NFL on Instagram

    I’ve been finding it really hard to get my productivity mojo going this month, and it’s affecting me more than usual. Maybe it’s just all the gossip about underinflated footballs in the news right now, but the current buzzword certainly sums up my mood this week: I feel deflated.

    I know that I had things down, I was moving along pretty well right before the holiday break, and I had even planned out where I would pick things up again in the new year. But I had lost more than I realized when I came back to work, forgotten a lot of the nuances of projects I was working on, and what was important and what could wait. And I forgot about how easy it is to get interrupted or distracted by the needs of others.

    It’s as if somewhere during those ten days off, all the projects I had been working on left my head, and all my work day routines went with them–woosh! Great for my vacation time, but not so great when I’m back at work and trying to get stuff done. (more…)

  • Coat. Hat. Gloves. Repeat.

    Being really cold in winter is nothing new to me. I’ve lived in the Northeast of the U.S. of all my life, and January to February of every year seems to have at least one solid week of single-digit to below-zero temperatures we must endure, intermingled by “mild” days where it may get up to 40 degrees. Good times.

    The challenge of winter then is in trying to be prepared on any given day for not just how cold or wet it is when I leave the house, but also how that may change during the day.

    I’ve lived in Ithaca, NY for more than a decade, where the topography of steep hills carved by gorges overlooking a lake makes for some stunning scenery, but also creates a microclimate that can change our weather dramatically from one hour to the next depending where you are. It’s not uncommon to see it snowing ferociously over the campus where I work on the slope of South Hill, while only a light flurry falls on the flats of downtown half a mile below. Weather forecasts really are more of a guideline, which means taking precautions.

    In winter, I’ve learned that there are only three important items I need in to be warm and comfortable no matter how cold it gets: the right coat, a warm hat, and warm gloves. I’ve also learned over the years that a warm hat and gloves are two of the easiest things to misplace or forget in the hubbub of getting to and from home and work.

    But that’s not a problem any more because I’ve got a nearly foolproof method to be sure I’m never without the accessories I need to stay warm in any situation… (more…)

  • Muscle Memory

    Last weekend I was at a party where I got the chance to play the video game Rock Band for the first time. Having been a drummer for almost 20 years, I thought it should be a piece of cake to sit behind the game controller of rubber and plastic electronic drums and start jamming with the rest of the players.

    2015/01/img_0885.png

    I gave my drumstick a twirl as the screen started clicking off a beat to a classic Yes tune  (yeah, I was playing with a bunch of adults my age – it’s called classic rock for a reason) and then I started getting my cues from the screen. All I had to do was watch the stream of different colors come down the pathway toward me and hit the gamepad “drums” for each corresponding color in time with the beat.

    But playing a drumming video game is not the same as playing actual drums. In fact, my experience playing drums probably made me worse at Rock Band because I had years of muscle memory built up that I had to ignore. This was suddenly a lot harder than I expected – and being surrounded by gamers who were all playing on “Expert” level didn’t help my ego much.

    But here’s the good news: it turns out that recent research on habits and behavior has shown this kind of disruption of our environment is an important part of making changes to any habit, especially the bad ones, and that’s something we can learn to use to our advantage.

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  • Making a Resolution Long Pass

    I love that New Year’s resolutions have become so ingrained in our culture as something doomed to fail, and yet we continue to make them. It’s hard not to see the start of each new year (or even a new month) as a time for renewal and positive change in our lives. Who doesn’t want to be a better person?

    But I’ve learned that the resolutions that fail are the ones that weren’t made in good faith to begin with. I wasn’t being honest with myself about what I could accomplish or change, but merely what I was hoping I could change; I had vague goals, but no real plan for making them happen, and suffered little consequence if they didn’t happen.

    So here’s to making honest resolutions, based on not just what I want to gain for myself, but what I want from myself.

    I won’t resolve to run more if what I really want is an excuse to buy new shoes.

    I won’t make resolutions just because I think they’ll make someone else happy. I will follow my gut, not my ego.

    I will find my tribe and share my resolutions with them. I will change my surroundings/environment/context to reflect and support my goals.

    I will make a resolution that means something, a resolution I can plan for, monitor its progress, and bring to a close by the end of the year in a way that feels like more than just accomplishment – it feels like victory.

    My New Year’s resolution is a long pass to myself from today into the future, a throw from the end zone of last year so high and so smooth that I can watch it climb and arc overhead as I run forward through the year, dodging interference, leaping over tackles, and plotting my way to the point I know the ball will be landing at the end of the year ahead of me, and I’d better be there to catch it.

    This website is a big part of that resolution – turning something I didn’t know I had into something more tangible I can share. I’m going to keep adding to it and expand the scope, and I’m not even completely sure how I’m going to do it. But I have a good idea where that pass I’m throwing is going to land at the end of the year…

    Time to get those running shoes on.

  • The Truly Productive Gift Guide

    This post started out very differently, as yet another list of recommended “gifts for productive people” or something along those lines. I spent a couple hours collecting my list over the past week, finding images to embed and establishing details about each item and why it was on the list and blah blah blah.

    It was looking really good, like a lot of other similar lists I’d been seeing. Which is when I realized that nobody needed that blog post. Not even me.

    All I was doing was adding to the noise, creating another listicle that didn’t really say anything, and I wasn’t really learning anything by writing it either. So instead, I’m happy to present a “gift guide” that not only encourages productivity but is in itself productive because there’s only one suggested gift on it.

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  • Starting At One

    It’s the beginning of a new month. Perfect time to finally get started on that thing.

    Day One for December calendar

    You know what I mean – we all have a thing. It’s that project or task we’ve been putting off and telling ourselves we’re too busy to start; we’re waiting to think about it more because we’re just not sure we’ve figured it all out yet, but at the same time it’s starting to bother us that we haven’t gotten started on it yet because it’s important or timely or we just need to get it out of the way. That thing that’s distracting us, a bit of psychic grit in our cognitive gears.

    You know what your thing is. You’re reading mine right now.

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  • Something new…

    100% Human logo buttons

    It was one month ago on this date that I first shared my “Human at Work” presentation. To mark that milestone, I’m launching this site and blog as a new outlet for sharing my progress and ongoing ideas about how we can be more human in our work and in our everyday lives. (more…)

  • “Human at Work”

    I was thrilled to give my first-ever professional conference presentation this past October as one of dozens of awesome higher ed web folks speaking at the 2014 HighEdWeb Annual Conference in Portland. I presented a confessional “case study of myself” titled Human at Work or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Get Better at My Job and I was honored to receive awards for both “Best in Track” and “Best of Conference” for my efforts.

     
    I have created an entire page on this site dedicated to resources and links referenced in my talk, which will continue to be updated here: dave-cameron.com/human

    Enjoy, and please pass it on!