On Words and Business

• My home. I have one and the only “problem” with it is too much heat in the wintertime.
• My family and friends. For all the regular reasons.
• The manufacturer of my favorite candy, which is made in Britain and not available in the U.S. For letting consumers order directly and for shipping across the pond.

What about your home life are you thankful for?

• My work. I love getting to write for a living.
• My clients. They’re a varied and interesting bunch of people, and each make me smile in their own way.
• My colleagues. For their encouragement and friendship, and the occasional bagel.

What about your work are you thankful for?

You read it here first: I can’t chew gum while I write.

At no stage of writing, from blank page to rewrites or edits, can I be chewing gum. Even if I’m not reading the piece out loud to myself. Don’t know why.

What can’t you do while you are writing?

Spam makes me laugh.

Not e-mail from legitimate businesses that I’m simply not interested in.The other kind of spam.

The kind where they fill the text up with random words. Sometimes the words, or the combinations of words, are hilarious. One guy keeps emailing me to tell me he found me a job–one day I got about 20 messages with the same subject line, from the same return address. I’ve got a good spam filter, so I only saw them when I checked to make sure no legit messages got through.

(I don’t knowingly open spam email, but I do see the full text of spam that gets sent to my blog.)

And by the way…I mean the less-obscene messages. Some of them make me want to take a shower if I even accidentally glance at the subject line.

Besides offending or just bugging people, what is the purpose of this kind of spam?

Last week I discovered a great resource I’d never imagined existed.

In my quest for several sources for a story I’m writing, a friend recommended I try Profnet. It’s a service allowing journalists and communications professionals to access thousands of experts.

Just fill out a form saying what you need and when you need it. Specify the type of expert you are seeking (academic, corporate, government, etc.). And send it. Next thing you know, all sorts of people are responding with offers of help.

It take some reviewing of the responses to select those you’d like to use. But that’s better than spending hours or days trying to figure out how I can find an expert in the field I’m writing about.

It’s brilliant!  Check it out.

Each day I see blog headlines on my home page and get email newsletters and updates from various individuals, companies, and organizations. Then there are websites I visit (or want to visit) for news and information. That’s not even counting all the magazines I read in hard copy (which I just love!), getting my work done, or taking a break to eat dinner, bake cookies, or sleep through the night. I never get to do it all each day. Not even close.

How is it that there are people who post to their blog multiple times a day? Spend time IMing, Twittering, Digging, keeping everyone apprised of their activities on LinkedIn, and using whatever other new social networking tool is out there. When do these people work? Or eat? Or sleep?

How do you fit in all the new technologies and forms of communications with your work and the rest of your life? What do you give up to get it all done?