Going green… at work!

In recent years, most of us have made some steps to “go green” at home. Those with some extra cash might have taken advantage of government rebates to invest in water tanks or solar panels, and others are experimenting with growing their own veggies, and for some of us, it means cutting down our power usage, and shopping from local stores with sustainable suppliers.  However much we might have done, there are several ways to green up around home.

At work, it’s a different matter. There are usually processes to go through, management committees to consult, etc.  Perhaps your admin officer has always bought the same type of printing paper and doesn’t want to change.  Maybe your office roommate needs to keep the air-conditioner on ALL the time, even when it’s not that hot.  And sometimes it’s just a case of nobody wanting to take responsibility for it all, because let’s face it, everyone has enough on their plate at work.

But it doesn’t always have to be a big deal.  It can start with trying to cut down on printing, and switching lights off in the rooms that aren’t being used, to using mugs and glasses in the kitchen instead of disposable cups.  From there you can progress to getting a couple of good indoor plants to keep the air fresh, and changing to long-life bulbs whenever a light blows.  Next time you’re ordering printer paper, look for one that uses farmed trees, or recycled paper, preferably unbleached and from a reputable company.  You might pay a little extra, but your photocopier will love you.  Ultimately, for bigger changes, a committee or dedicated go-to person will be needed, and from there changes should go into office policies.  It might take a bit of momentum, but it will be worth it!  Why have different rules for work and home?

And to help you out on the bigger issues, here are a couple of websites I’ve used before.  The first, GECKO, offers a free guide each year. The other one, planet green, has plenty of useful links.  Check them out, and start going green at work!

Create the Ultimate Exercise Playlist

I think, this week, we can all feel the chill in the air subsiding, which means that Summer is on the way back.  For many this is a source of excitement (especially those of us who live in Queenslanders and are sick of cold air creeping up through the floorboards).  But there’s another side to summer – working off our winter weight.

Most of us prefer to exercise to music, but there is quite an art to finding the best music to work out to.  It’s not just about finding something with a fast beat and sticking on our iPod.  There is, apparently, quite a science to it.  I’m told the best music to work out to has between 120-140 beats per minute.  And then you have to choose the order…  Luckily, Lifehacker have come to the rescue again with some tips.  Check it out here.

Improve your focus

When juggling a number of tasks with different priorities, it is easy to lose focus.  Once distracted, it can take several minutes just to get back to the task at hand.  I recently found this article on Productivity501 which outlines some points on improving focus at work.  It outlines the “multitasking myth” (thank goodness – because I’ve never been good at it!) and then looks at various points that can distract us, and how to work around them.

Read the article here, and let me know if it helps you improve your focus and get more done in your work day.

Will Social Media actually SAVE you time?

Following on from the recent post about ways that social media has changed our sector, I noticed this article, again from Mashable, about how social media and networking can save you time.

For those of you who are completely new to the worlds of facebook, twitter and other strange things, this might seem an unlikely claim.  However, if you’ve bravely started to dabble in these technologies, you may be starting to see some potential, even if you’re not quite sure how to proceed.  The main gist of the article is that social media can help you be more productive, if you use it complement the way you already work, rather than changing the way you work to suit it.  Sounds simple?  It is.  Read the full article here.

Social Media and its place in the community sector

I’ve been working in the community sector for a little under two years now, and when I first joined, I was frankly surprised that there was so little use of social networking and social media around the place, considering that it is mostly free, easy to use, and has a lot of potential.  I’ve looked around for answers to this quandary in the meantime, and the responses I most commonly hear are “I don’t really have time to learn how to do it all” or “what would we use it for?”

To the first response, I say “well, it might take a little time to learn, but it will save you time in the long run, so that’s worth it, right?” with varied responses.

To the second one, well, take a look at this article from Mashable.  They have outlined just a few ways that social media can change the way we work in the community, not-for-profit sector, including broader engagement and deepening relationships, organising groups around causes, and facilitating collaboration.  Take a look at the article here.

Finding Time for New Things

To get the ball rolling on the Community Community, I’d like to offer this article from Lifehacker. A lot of us who work in the community sector often think about taking up a hobby, or learning a new skill outside of work, but by the time we’ve finished work each day, it seems the last thing we want to do is concentrate on something new.  This article offers a few skills we might find helpful…

Courtesy of Lifehacker:

You’ve got a career, friends, family, and a mountain of other responsibilities that have a monopoly on your time. So how, amidst all those time-consuming responsibilities, do you find time to learn something new or tackle a passion project?

There’s little I love more than a good passion project, and I’ve generally got at least one outside-of-work project that I’m dedicating time to. (Lately, most of these projects involve programming, like learning to build a web site with no experience; right now I’m working on an open-source, cross-platform note-taking application.) My writers have on occasion marveled at everything I appear to accomplish outside of the daily grind involved in keeping the wheels from falling off here at Lifehacker. While I think they have an overly inflated sense of just how much I get done, I’ve also promised them that I’d do my best to explain how I find time to learn new things and take on rather large projects. So here goes.

NOTE: While a silver bullet for getting more done is always enticing, there’s not much any of us can do about squeezing more than 24 hours into any day. As with most productivity advice, what follows probably falls into the category of common sense, but sometimes it’s helpful to get a little common sense reminder from time to time.

Grout Your Days with What Your Want to Accomplish

Last year at a Twitter conference here in Los Angeles, nerd, comedian, tech lover, frequent tweeter, and friend of Lifehacker Chris Hardwick addressed criticisms that using Twitter was a big, narcissistic waste of time. In making his point, Hardwick offered an analogy that stuck with me. He explained that it’s not as though he’s spending hour after hour devising and composing his next tweet, and Twitter’s not taking time away from anything else he’d already be doing. Rather, he grouts his days with Twitter. He’s got a free moment here and there, he’s got a thought/idea/link/joke he wants to share, and he shares it.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE.

Welcome to the Community Community

Hi Everybody!  This blog will be for those wonderful people who work in the Community Sector. It is currently run by me, Daniel, a worker at the Youth Affairs Network of Qld (YANQ)  which is the peak body for Youth Services in Queensland, Australia.  But this isn’t just for youth workers, this is for anyone who works in any part of the community sector.

This isn’t really a work-related blog, it’s more about who we are as people, as workers struggling away in an under-resourced, under-funded sector, and how we can find the technical, logistical, and everyday support to help us along, for those particularly long weeks when our passion for helping people just isn’t quite enough…

Of course, sometimes there are sector things going on that affect us all, like the recent wage-increase that the Government couldn’t afford to cover, meaning that many organisations had to cut hours to cover our small wage increase.  This struggle will be ongoing, and I hope you’ll all leave comments and thoughts and messages of support to share how you feel about all this.

I’ll also post things of a very practical nature, like how to use social networking (like facebook and twitter) to make your life easier, and how to make sure your workstation is OH&S compliant, and also things completely unrelated to work, like what’s going on the world, or where to run away to this weekend.

I hope you’ll all try to follow regularly, and chase me up if I don’t post often enough.  Try using an RSS system, and let me know if you don’t know how – I’ll include a post about it!

This is your blog, Community people!