the world of not being able to finish anything

We were down the pub this week talking about being in the middle of micro-sub-divisions of technical tasks. Quality assurance, error testing, version control. Passing chunks of developing digital infrastructure back and forth without bloating, ballooning or dropping important functions out through suddenly compromised bottoms. Of the peculiar, impossible joy of building on skittish foundations that upgrade and sidegrade and downgrade around you, endlessly.

And then back to work, like you do, and trying to figure out how to break into a useful webinar that you've certainly signed up for and that will be useful because the ideas in the public-private-academic sphere this year will wash up on the operational-functional-design shore next year, or likely sooner.

This combination of booking system and delivery system had been playing nicely last time I used it, but today was just offering a momentary glimpse of a light grey square, vanishing into whitespace. I tried again a few times, like you always do, pavlov-trained by the sometimes-that-works effect.

Then I noticed that someone had rapidly edited the last of the four invitation emails to include a directlink to seminar. Great. I swifted through the hack-run needed to access this particular video conferencing tool from inside secure virtual network and arrived only half a sentence late.

The following day I got a rating email, and mistaking this for being from the organisers, filled it in and submitted it, at which point I was taken to a page on the booking website, where I could fill it in and add a comment, and at the end of this process I was given this message:

The rating system was as detached as everything else. Not, I suspect, that you couldn't set it all up to work seamlessly and tidily, but that's not in the bare minimum needed to make it work; and if it was, that would mark a fall-off point, a too-much-bother moment for the person who absolutely, yes, could work out how everything works given will enough and time.

And then, today, back to work, like you do, and signing up for a conference via a terrifying sawn-off, hacked together e-booking system full of more red flags than a rebound date with a problematic ex-partner. Because, you know welcome to the world of not being able to finish 

slippery concepts and time displaced interactions

Digital Wellbeing is a slippery concept, but a very useful one. I think. From the physical impact of increasing levels of sedentary and screen-moderated work to the psychological impact of the unbounded online task space we are in a zone now where digital wellbeing is a core self-care skill at every age. 

Digital needs vary throughout lifespan, also. Right now, the pioneers of the ubiquitous online digital space and presence are starting to move into a life stage where they need to define the needs of older people online. This will need a move from a digital deficit model to one of digital enablement, sensory support and less of the constant upchurn of new irrelevant system learning. 

At the other end of the agespan, children online need to move from a behavioural approach defined by fear of online risk to one which embraces online possibilities and asserts digital rights. Children (and teenagers, especially) need space to experiment, learn, construct identity and make mistakes. You don't get to that in a tediously constant risk environment.

For many adults the endlessly spawning nature of online digital administration has created online work, education and home administration spaces of dystopian intensity where tasks proliferate, endlessly and boundlessly. Not least among these task-spawning areas is wellbeing, where bots, apps, tasks, calendars, to-dos, alerts and more all cluster around the increasing task space of maintaining happiness and optimism in a complex modern world.

My digital wellbeing task list includes three social actions for each hundred comments read

I scan the comments section. People are talking about: peace of mind and safety; navigating wellbeing; reducing their use of digital activities to increase their wellbeing; information and relatable sources.

Five useful tips for getting the most out of your course

Interested to see the five useful tips essentially reduce to: self identify, interact, follow, bookmark, record and resist the urge to lurk. The same basic rules of interacting on forums. 

The potential unfamiliar term here, lurking, is a concept that has been around since well before the online social space. Group-created magazines and resources such as APAs (amateur press associations) and Zines (amateur produced magazines) used the term RAEBNC (pronounced ray-b-nik or rayb-nich in conversation) to stand for "Read and Enjoyed but no Comment" for exactly that moment in time when you have completed viewing the information item but have nothing to add. 

In physical space training (I train in both environments) there is a body language equivalent of RAEBNC - eye contact, a nod, a look, it varies student by student. The urge (expressed by some of my fellow trainers and most of my fellow managers) to have everyone "turn on their cameras" during sessions, meetings, etc. may come partly from that need to feel that the information you have shared has landed. 

The Teams/Zoom/etc. thumbsup 👍 is sometimes seen used in this way during group learning or sessions, but feels comparatively vague and unreliable. 

and.... where are you from?

Questions to start a conversation is a core part of online course building, of course. Why have you decided to join us on this course? is a classic up there with Well, what do you do?

Hm. I am procrastinating by doing this course. I actually need to be building an online course. But I don't want it to contribute the heavy exhausting online digital task burden we are all labouring under constantly at the moment. I want it underpinned by principles of digital wellbeing. So I'm starting by gathering ideas about how to do this. 

That probably has covered most of my key learning aims for completing this course, although there is another; I am recovering from illness and building up my speed at both reading and writing. Ideally I ought to be doing this as an exercise, a bit a day. That has not really happened. 

Final question is as ever: How will you use the information you get from this course? Well, the course is linked to my area of work, but this is coming from a very different angle from my usual work task space of social care's preoccupation with digital risk and safeguarding and online child protection. 

This library and information studies approach of providing core information and enabling the individual to construct their own actions and solutions is very crucial in Early Help practice, and a space I hope to develop.

is there no end to maladaptive helpfulness?

Today I've been partly transferring things from a system where they have been kept in directories to one where the individual files hold metadata. There's a web page tangled up in it and several different versions of versioning. But at least people are agreed on one thing:

We can't go on like this

This is awkward because of course there is no dedicated person resource to put on this. That's normal now. As the joke goes, the person holding the old systems while we are waiting for the new systems to be ready for transfer is never out of work. But at some stage their workloads slide into overflow, and then they really need another system to help them manage the unmanageable build-up of systems. A system system, if you like. Which I probably won't? But one thing is certain: 

There are too many wizards playing with my expectations

Never mind though, because there are a whole raft of wellfullness and mindbeing tasks to perform to keep my panic on the even side of my keel. Some of them can be turned off, others are easier to simply live with. My CBT app, for example, stopped being helpful some time ago. But I find myself feeling awkward about turning it off. I know in the abstract that it's just a set of decision trees that frequently repeat, a non-intelligent-conversational-generator if you like. But it still feels like an inappropriately harsh rejection, to delete. But I probably will. Hm, tomorrow.

can I get to open window zero?

So here I am, frantically closing windows because the working day ended about an hour and twenty minutes ago.  I have too many windows. Too many tasks. Just one more thing. But then there always comes the point at which the working day meets a vanishing point even though the tasks won't, couldn't, wouldn't, and maybe even shouldn't.

References:

XKCD Standards - Print out this comic giant size and tape it to the table under your brainstorm.

Wikipedia's System of Systems page - Currently, systems of systems is a critical research discipline for which frames of reference, thought processes, quantitative analysis, tools, and design methods are incomplete.

Download Woebot App  - Life changes, and so do we, with the help of a non-intelligent database-driven interaction toy

VANISHING POINT: The Curation and Preservation of Virtual Reality - A lecture from the Digital Preservation Coalition at St Martin's College, with lunch and refreshments. Past event, you missed it.