1. Remember, you don’t need this job. You need a job, but not this one.

In my first full-time, salaried position, my boss shared this nugget of wisdom with me. (He shared the next one too.) I had to chew on this one for a bit, repeating it to myself in different ways for it to sink in. But once it did, it changed how I looked at my job.

The biggest change is that it removed a fear. I didn’t fear losing the job, because, after all, I didn’t need this job. With that gone, my attitude shifted to where I was willingly giving my time to the job. It was my choice to work there, so in a way, it gave me back some power, emotionally. I wasn’t dependent on the job, and I wasn’t begging for the chance to do that job. Instead, I had the freedom to focus instead on what I needed to in order to get the job done.

It also has helped me to not worry about the inevitable politics of an office, and instead more clearly relate to the people I work with. It helps me better respect my colleagues as the human beings we all are.

There is a simple, yet powerful, proverb that stands hand-in-hand with this pointer: “Do you work heartily as for the Lord rather than for men.” Attitude-wise, taking this proverb seriously means that I crave honor from God, not from my boss, coworkers, clients, or employees. This has been profound for me, and I encourage all who read this to take this proverb to heart.

This first pointer is probably the biggest of these for me.

2. If you want to seem invaluable, find a problem and solve it. See a vacuum? Fill it.

This one is obviously simple, I think, but sometimes I wonder if it just hasn’t occurred to people. If you want to be valuable, do something valuable. Keep your eyes open for that thing that clearly needs doing that you have a shot at doing, and figure it out. If it happens to make sense with your job description, great. If not, just do it anyway.

3. A secret part of your job is to make your boss look good.

This is an interesting one because it still applies when you aren’t happy with your boss.

How do you do this one? You give your boss credit for good work, good decisions, whatever, to others. You don’t have to overdo it, but keep it in mind. Also, I’ve been in situations where I’ve been asked to help prepare a presentation or a proposal for my boss, and even though I may not be the one delivering the presentation, I can try to make sure that my boss will seem  organized, coherent, and smart.

This pointer is helpful because, by making this part of my job, it forces me to check myself when I have a bad attitude about the person I report to.

4. Bring an alternate idea along when you bring a critique. (And if you can’t, then think twice about offering your critique.)

The point of feedback, of critique, is to make something better. I get the feeling that people forget this, and think that the point of critique is to look smart, to make someone else look dumb, and to thrill in the dark joy of shredding someone else’s work.

So, if the point of critique is to make something better, doesn’t it make sense to point out a problem and immediately follow it with at least one idea to overcome that problem? Maybe it isn’t the idea that will be chosen, but by offering that idea, you make yourself a collaborator with the person who receives the critique. You offering an idea can spur more creative thinking on the problem. Plus, offering an idea is brave, because your idea can now receive critique. If all you ever do is critique but never add ideas, you’re probably a coward and are making things worse, not better.

Closing

I know there are all kinds of other thoughts on work that I have, and I’m sure many of my blog readers have their own life lessons to share.

Please comment with your reactions or additions!

The cup and Vader, courtesy of Alaina and Lisa.

I have a coffee cup at work. It resembles a jumbo marshmallow with a handle and “Pause.” printed on the side. There’s a small story behind the cup itself, but today I write for another reason. It was abducted, and I received a series of sinister photos.

Due to a back problem, I had to leave work for a few days. It was during this absence that two of my co-workers showed their true colors. Dark, dark evil.

Read their confessions and view the evidence for yourself.

• Coffee Cup Shennanigans by Alaina
• Coffee Cup Shennanigans: an Epilogue by WasabiJane

View from top of Yerbe Buena Gardens, San Francisco, March 2010.

Saturday PM: Sunshine!

I actually began to sweat under my blazer from the warm sun shining brightly through the window.

I had arrived in San Francisco a little early on Saturday, dropped my suitcase off at the Intercontinental Hotel, and walked around the corner to a sandwich shop for a bite to eat and to get online. As I draped my coat over the back of the chair, I decided I really like San Francisco. It’s the sun, I admit it. Oh, and I had already noted that the two billboards I noticed on the taxi from the airport were pure tech: one for an enterprise search system and another for PGP. Billboards talking to me? Amazing.

After settling in at the hotel, I had dinner with my old colleague Chris Burley and his girfriend at a nice Italian restaurant. Chris is awesome. I love talking with him because he has such passion for what he does, which currently is to help lead efforts like urban farming in the Bay area.

Sunday AM: 3 good things

The next morning I woke early due to the time zone difference, and I had three excellent experiences:

1. In the aching fog of caffeine deprivation, had the best cup of coffee of my life, thanks to the Blue Bottle Café. (I admit, I ordered a second cup to go.)
2. Paused in the Yerbe Buena Gardens where some elderly practiced tai chi and parents snapped photos as their little children hid behind a waterfall. I stood on a bridge and watched the morning sun ripple on the glass of San Francisco skyscrapers.
3. Crashed a church service at a music venue called Mezzanine put on by a group that calls itself IKON. I was the oldest person there, amidst a crowd of art school students. We sang, we listened to a teaching from the Word, we had communion. It was good.

Sunday PM: MX day 1

Sunday afternoon saw the start of the 2010 MX Conference.

MX2010 is largely focused on managing user experience and less on the tactical end of UX practice, and there were some thought-provoking presentations from people who have been managing user experience for a number of years, in a number of different types of companies. Off the top of my head, presenters represented firms in financial industries (Vanguard), publishing (Harvard Business Review), retail sporting goods, and online media (Youtube).

The series of talks was fantastic, and was kicked off with a keynote by Jared Spool in which he shared insights like that Gallup’s Customer Engagement (CE11) metric has high correlation to the quality of user experience. Spool’s keynote actually turned out to predict some themes that carried throughout the many presentations. Among them were the importance of establishing a vision for user experience and that experience ultimately must be addressed well across multiple channels (web, mobile, physical space, etc.).

Spool talked about three core attributes necessary for great user experience: Vision, Feedback, and Culture. He posed three questions that UX managers should ask.

1. VISION: Can everyone on the team describe the experience of using your design 5 years from now?
2. FEEDBACK: In the last six weeks have you spent more than two hours watching someone use your design or a competitor’s design?
3. CULTURE: In the last six weeks have you rewarded a team member for creating a major design failure?

After the conference reception, I wound down the evening by taking a walk around a few blocks and ending at a nearby bar. I ate a burger and watched the Academy Awards for a while. Back at the hotel I watched the end of a Clint Eastwood Western flick and fell asleep.

Monday AM+PM: MX day 2

I woke at 4 in the morning. I checked analytics, email, and my usual RSS feeds. I stretched, washed, dressed, and still had time to kill. I read a few chapters in The Shack, a book Adam gave me last week.

I chatted throughout the day with Haakon, a usability specialist attending from the design company Tarantell in Norway, and as he sipped his coffee, I decided to not mention my mere three hour time difference.

The rest of the day was another series of excellent presentations. Themes: customer (more than user) experience, vision that guides the business, new models for working in the network, UX leadership stories from Youtube, customer experience in renovation of thinking at Harvard Business Review Online, understanding the holistic customer, data-driven design decisions (and when not to rely on data for design decisions), experience design as business strategy, and operating as a chief experience officer in your company.

It was great to hear first-hand the stories from these user experience leaders. Now, for what to do with it all when returning to the office.

Tomorrow and then

Tomorrow morning I fly back to Michigan, and need to get my head back into product owner and user experience work. But I also need to hold onto the ideas from this conference, and shift into actively leading user (or is that customer) experience work at Covenant Eyes.

Photocredit: Tony Hall. Click photo to visit Tony's photostream @ flickr.com

Pen-less. It’s 9:30 in the evening, and I need to write out some thoughts (about a split-complementary color set).

At work last Friday, the pen that I’ve had with me for some months now finally gave up its last ink. It was a Pilot Precise V5, black.

My habit has been to have that pen in my left front pants pocket, reliably at hand. I guarded it, making sure to have it back if I let a colleague or a daughter use it for a moment. I gave other pens like it away, but kept that one.

Of course I have other pens. Bic ball-point pens: the kind you get in bulk in the plastic bags during back-to-school sales. I hate those pens. They fail so often, and you have to drag the ink out of them, scraping across paper. Scribble in circles first just to get them warmed up. Lazy bastards. Then you have to draw across your strokes again, filling in ink on the empty indentations of your first pass at writing.

I’m irritated at myself for getting into this pen-less position. Luckily, I have Plan B: pencils and a sharpener.

When I was leading many design/development projects at a time, I’d write a creative brief for each—it helped me and the team stay clearheaded about each project. An experience theme seems like an alternative to a creative brief.

The following thoughts apply Chastain’s article to my work at Covenant Eyes.

Covenant Eyes is rich with stories

At Covenant Eyes, Inc., we have a full-time blogger, Luke. As I see it, Luke’s job is to draw out the stories surrounding Covenant Eyes and to share them using the Internet. He’s our storyteller.

What are the roles? There are so many stories, from people in so many places in life.

• husbands, fathers
• wives, mothers
• children
• pastors, rabbis
• counselors
• porn addicts, recovering porn addicts, people who have beaten the addiction
• and the list continues

What are some theme concepts?

• For people fighting a problem with pornography: Learn to be honest again (These words come from Michael Leahy’s mouth while he was visiting our offices.)
• For mothers with children who use the Internet: Protect my family
• For fathers with a teenage son: Teach him to be responsible for his actions

Experience transcends our services

What work do we do at our company? Although others I work with may claim we deliver software, I think we deliver information. Our software allows us to provide information-rich reports on Internet usage that can be used within relationships. I think of these as “accountability relationships.”

The theme concepts listed above have little to do with software or even our service. The real value we provide is that we can provide the sense for people that what could be their little secret is not actually hidden. That little bit of knowledge has proven its ability to change lives, and relationships, for the better.

The hard part is carrying the experience theme across our touch points with users

I recently helped put together a spreadsheet to inventory the automated emails we send to users at various points. There were over 60 emails, and they fulfill needs ranging from billing concerns to helpful reminders after a few weeks of being a customer. Many of these messages should be revised, and keeping the theme in mind will help create a coherent experience for our users.

Covenant Eyes has multiple touch points with its users.

Beyond these emails is a myriad of other touch points:

• sign up form
• help documents
• filter settings controls
• accountability reports
• tech support phone calls
• blog posts
• and so on

Taken all together, these communications can benefit from an experience theme.

I suspect the key to pulling this off is to have all those involved with crafting these touch points understand the experience theme and leave it to them to carry it through. As the company’s user experience lead, my job may be to facilitate the definition and adoption of an experience theme, and motivate and lead by example so others will carry the vision.

This particular story concerns a navigation system that utilizes pagination in what at first seems an obvious choice, but upon observation it is clear that this is a very poor approach.

Background: Company setting

Covenant Eyes, Inc., is an  8 year old software company in Michigan with about 50 employees. About a dozen are customer service representatives, some for enterprise customers and some for individual or family accounts. There are about 10 in the IT team, which includes myself.

Background: What service does our company provide? Internet accountability.

Take 2 actors, George and his friend Paul. George is addicted to online porn, but he really wants to beat his addiction because he feels it is wrong and could really mess up his life. To attack his problem, George installs our software on his computer. The software keeps tabs on George’s activity, and once a week sends a report of that activity over to Paul. Paul can then talk with George about George’s Internet activity. It seems simple, but removing the anonymity of his addiction is powerful.

The point, in a nutshell, is accountability. If George is trying to kick some bad online habits, his friend Paul now has information in these reports that he can use to hold George accountable.

The current design calls for pagination

These Accountability Reports are like executive summaries that include links over to what we call the “Detailed Logs.” This log is a full list of URLs that George visited.

Depending on the amount of activity, the log may have thousands of entries for Paul to navigate.

When these logs first became available, customers’ download speeds were more of an issue than they are today, so the developers knew that they could not simply put all the entries on a single page because the pages would take far too long to load.

Pagination to the rescue! The developers broke up the long list of URLs into pages, each page having 50 URLs. To help Paul navigate this long series of pages, numbered page links and “Previous” and “Next” links were placed at the top and bottom of each page.

So, let’s say Paul is looking at page 50. He would see something like the pagination navigation shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Pagination

This seems a good approach on two fronts.

1. Paul won’t wait to download one page with over 8,000 URLs on it, but if we divide that time into, in this case, 165 separate downloads, each page will seem pretty quick.
2. Pagination will work for Paul because he uses pagination on nearly every search engine results page. It’s nothing new to him.

Bingo. Problem solved. Right?

But why does it take so many clicks to find the right info?

I was standing next to Mike, one of our Customer Service Representatives, and asked him a seemingly simple question. “Mike, can you bring up that log and show me what was going on last Tuesday at 11:32 AM?”

I did not intend it to be a usability test, but it might as well have been. Mike helps people every day by walking them through reports and logs, so he is as expert as anyone gets at navigating these logs. Yet, the basic task of finding a page with a specific time on it was accomplished by a series of guesses, each slightly more informed than the previous guess. It took 8 tries before Mike got us to the right page.

Since then, I have seen people repeatedly click the “Next” button, flipping through each page to find the one page they want. With 165 or so pages in a log, this can take far more than 8 clicks.

If someone knows the date and time they want to view in a Detailed Log, shouldn’t they be able to get to that page without guessing on the first try?

20/20 hindsight: Why is it so hard to find the right page?

Pagination is a valid interface design pattern, and is perhaps most often seen on search engine result pages. Still, it does not work well here.

So, why doesn’t pagination work here? Thinking in information architecture terms can help answer the question.

Pagination is a metaphor from the print world

We’ve all grown up reading books and magazines, and so page numbers are a tool we take for granted. In print, they are used to keep track of where we left off so we can pick back up at the right point. They are also used as non-digital hypertext, like in a magazine where we see “continued on page 58.”

On the web, pagination has become something slightly different, but the metaphor carries over well enough to work for us. On search results pages, we now expect to see a pagination interface at the bottom of the search results to allow us to continue to the next page of 10 or 20 links. One difference on the web is that we expect those links on the first page to have higher relevancy than those on the following pages.

So, on the web pagination is an answer to a finding question, and is based on an underlying organizational system of quantity ordered by relevancy.

However, in this case, the list is ordered by time but paginated by quantity. In this case, people want to find by time, but quantity is not metered evenly against time. So, page 1 might have 50 entries that cover 5 seconds of activity, and page 2 might have 50 entries that cover 32 hours of activity. There is no predictability of how much time will be represented from page to page of results, and that is why people are left with so much guess-work.

Match the interface to the underlying information architecture and users’ information needs

In recent work, we’ve shifted to a time-based pagination (Figure 2) from a quantity-based pagination (Figure 1). We think this will go a long way towards helping people find what they want without having to guess.

Figure 2. Find-by-time instead of pagination.

I’ve observed a few users have their first contact with this revised interface, and it has worked well so far. We may have introduced other usability issues in the process, but this is a step in the right direction.

Moral of the story?

Before implementing a user interface design pattern, be sure you first understand the information architecture and users’ information needs. Otherwise you risk using the wrong pattern, hurting your users’ experiences, and missing out on an opportunity for innovation and good design.

In addition to the conference itself on Wednesday and Thursday, I’ll attend 2 full-day tutorials:

• Use Cases in an Agile World
• Field Research for User Experience Design

I’m looking forward to the events, and intend to blog about the highlights. Stay tuned!

I entered an organization in the midst of its ongoing, subtle identity crisis. Do we think of ourselves as trainers? We are called that, sometimes, because we give short courses and workshops on various computing topics, and these topics are often thick with training on using specific software packages. For example, how to use Microsoft Access.

At first, I didn’t know what to call myself. Trainer? Instructor? Teacher?

Over the past months, as I’ve proceeded to teach courses on a variety of topics in computing, I know that I’m an educator. Even when teaching a course on Excel, I strive to not just have the learners practice with the software, but to understand why the software works as it does. My hope is that they leave the course not only with the knowledge of how to do the fairly mundane tasks of sorting columns and using functions, but to also conceptualize and understand their data in ways that empower them to creatively bend Excel to their own purposes.

Beyond that, I’ve always recoiled emotionally from the word “trainer.” I do not wear shiny black boots, a whip, and a whistle. “Right-click! Good boy. Have a treat.”

Please, stop. I expect far, far more out of my fellow humans than a simple ability to jump through hoops. I expect ingenuity, creativity, tenacity.

So, all that said, this morning I read an essay, Human-Centered Design by Mike Cooley, from “Information Design,” edited by Jacobsen (published in 1999 by The MIT Press). Here is an excerpt that I appreciate.

My hierachy of verbs in these matters is that you program a robot, you train an animal, but you educate human beings. Education in this sense is not just what occurs in schools or universities, where, so often, students and teachers are, as Ivan Illich points out, “schooled to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new” (Illich 1971:9).

Well said.

I read that quote, it was taped to a cash register at Espresso Royale, back in July, about a month into my job as a technology trainer at the university, after having spent seven years producing web sites full-time.

Tomorrow marks six months into this job, and I’m beginning to work through the transition. Here are some ideas I’m starting to grasp—or at least wrestle with.

Work can be easy and it can be slow-paced.

Compared to starting and running an Internet consulting company for the last three years, and managing multiple web site productions for the last six or seven years, this job is a snap. There are far fewer deadlines and there just isn’t a lot of complexity or change in the work.

Plus, my role is far narrower than it was. I don’t need to be concerend about managing client relationships, doing accounting and other paperwork (which I stink at anyway), doing sales, writing proposals. And, I have far more time to produce far less.

However, just because it is easier, doesn’t mean I’m less concerend about doing it well. I like teaching most of these short technology courses, and I’ve been able to create some new courses by drawing on my background. I want to increase the quality of the overall program, and since I am not in a management position, one way I can do this is by example and contribution.

Do I want a career or simply a paycheck?

So, I don’t have an answer to this one. I have had a career in the field of web production. I am no longer actively participating in that field, though I don’t really feel like I’ve grown rusty yet. I have been keeping up on industry news and have continued conversations with colleagues who are still active in the industry.

In a skilled trade, people would develop their careers roughly by becoming an Apprentice, then a Journeyman, then a Master. And they would live by their trade. It seems like switching to a different trade would be foolish after a point.

Yet, that is what I have done. And it seems common these days, doesn’t it? People reinvent themselves. They change careers several times in their lives, right? Some do, anyway.

I think I would rate myself a fairly advanced Journeyman web producer. I have built or led development on hundreds of web sites since 1995. I’ve specialized in web site usability, information architecture, project management, writing for the web, and semantic markup. I have mentored a handful of developers and designers, a few of whom continue to work in the field.

I am not sure what it would take to be a Master, and unlike former times, I was able to study under many Masters, without their knowledge. Names? In no particular order: J. Nielsen, D. Norman, E. Meyer, J. Zeldman, the pros at Adaptive Path (I found Peter Merholz’s blog years ago and later discovered some cool things that jjg was doing), L. Rosenfeld, P. Morville, and as I think, so many others.

What would possess me to make such a drastic move away from my career in web production? Desperate measures follow desperate times, so it goes.

So, at this point I’m much closer to a career in web production. But, if I spend a few years doing technology training then it might start looking like a career in technology training. Which would I like more? At this point, I prefer web production as it is more dynamic and challenging work.

But I don’t dislike what I’m doing now. It helps that I have a good supervisor, a steady income that can be budgeted (unlike the variations in income as a self-employed person), and benefits for my family. Oh, and tomorrow I get to start using vacation time. I haven’t had a vacation in about four years.

Which is to say, right now I’m working for the paycheck.

Stillness

Early last month, Andy Johanson retired from the university. He had worked here for nearly forty years.

Forty years in the same building, the same office. Incredible. Seriously, I’m in awe.

My work history shows much more frequent changes. I worked for four or five years at the MSU Writing Center, a year or so at the LCC Writing Center, three years at University Relations here at MSU, then three years in my company. And now, I’m half a year into this position.

How does someone stay in the same type of position for so long? Granted, Andy’s job itself must have gone through substantial changes as it is in the computing field. Still, how did he last forty years? One piece of that picture that impresses me is that he didn’t seem in a rut or all that burnt-out. Maybe he is just good at hiding it, but I’ve seen other people who’ve worked in university or state jobs for a long time, and God forbid I should ever become so cynical and detached.

At the risk of people at MSU reading this, I’ve already applied for a different job, though it didn’t work out. I saw a position open at a company in Ann Arbor, Michigan for a Manager of Interface Design and it really matched up with what I want to do. It involved managing and mentoring a team of interface designs for a company whose products are delivered via the web. When I’ve had the opportunity to, I have really enjoyed managing and mentoring web designers and developers, so that would suit me. And, it would involve not only interface design, but also getting to the root of the information architecture of their products. The company called and let me know that they had already decided to promote someone internally to that position. They asked if I was interested in an interface designer position. I’m not. If I move, it will need to be into a leadership and management position, I think.

I’m trying to quiet my spirit and accept where I am and my changed role, at least for the time being.

MSU Writing Center crew from 1996

Chey showed me this picture a day or so ago. I think Jill Pennington (shown in the photo, middle row, second from the right) lent it to her. It was weird to see—it is from a completely different time of life. A good time, but very, very far removed from now. It even pre-dates Chey.

I’d try to name all the people, but I’m embarrassed to say I don’t remember all the names. Some I see are Mark Hara, Brad Kik, David Mosher, Sharon Thomas, Jill Johnson (now Pennington), Julie Bevins, Aimee Brazil, Laura Julier…and many others who I remember, but whose names escape me. It has been so long.

So, anyone from the MSU Writing Center who remember the names?

Incidentally, this photo was taken in a small enclosed garden inside of Bessey Hall on MSU’s campus. I’m guessing that it was taken in Spring of 1996. Give or take a year.

It was the second time I’ve done the course, and I don’t feel like it went as well as the first time I did it. The feedback from the students was fine. No major complaints, though I had a suggestion to go through some of the examples more slowly.

There were a couple people in the course that are taking over or need to manage fairly substantial web sites. It makes me realize that these people are walking out of these courses facing really severe demands, and there is only so much we can communicate in a 7 hour course. But there is so much that should be said, beyond the scope of the class.

Good luck to them, I guess. Hopefully they left the course today having learned something that will pay off for them with their projects.

Here’s the trouble: Web applications generally require some custom coding, and with a properly designed database, the SQL queries can prove challenging for DW to handle.

Dreamweaver works by setting up a database connection file, and then you can create what DW calls Recordsets that are based on the database connection. Each Recordset includes the query itself and the code used to retrieve the information. The Recordset then becomes a data resource that can be used to bind specific values to specific elements on a web page.

The trouble is, when you go in to the code to tweak the recordset, DW loses the Recordset. It just disappears from DW’s panel of Application Bindings. This is frustrating.

For a specific example, I was putting together a basic user login screen. I set up the Recordset fine, but I needed to apply an md5 function to a password value that was used in the query. Adding that one line of code to the Recordset causes DW to lose the recordset–which means I then cannot use it for any other data bindings.

My challenge is this: How do I decide to teach this course? Do I discourage people from using DW’s recordsets? That would negate a lot of potential value of using Dreamweaver. Certainly not all value, but it makes much of the GUI pointless. In what other ways is DW a helpful tool for creating dynamic sites? Of course, that is an easily answerable question, but I just need to get my thoughts in order.

It was a small course, and I realized after talking with the participants that the name of the course is misleading. Some people seemed to think the course was more concerned with web site accessibility (how to make web sites work for people with disabilities). Others thought it would have more details on visual design (the visibility part of the title).

The course was concerned with ways of getting your prospective site visitors to turn into actual site visitors. So, it covered topics like invisible sites (the dark web), how search spiders work, design and content considerations, site promotion, differences between search engines and directories, and some techniques on assessing how well you are doing with managing your site’s visibility.

So, what’s a better name for the course?

• Web Site Promotion
• Web Site Marketing
• Advertising Your Web Site
• Introduction to Search Engine Optimization
• Making Easy-to-Find Web Sites

Other ideas?

All of a sudden, I really appreciate having had a home office. If I figure one hour and forty five minutes average commute time per day (some days taking the bus, some days driving), then that makes eight hours and forty five minutes per week of commuting. If I multipy that by 50 weeks of working a year, that is 437 hours and 30 minutes a year. So, over the last three years of working at home, I’ve saved 1,300 hours by not having to commute.

That’s a lot of time. And gas.

So. I have a job for which I need to commute, and so am faced with the prospect of spending lots and lots of time between here and there over the coming years.

Telecommuting would be an option, except that my job is to train people in person. So, for the most part, telecommuting is not an option.

Another option is to get a car that I could use for commuting. That would cut out the more time-consuming option of taking the bus.

Another option is moving closer to work, so that I can walk or so that the commute is considerably shorter (fifteen minutes would be nice). Walking has a benefit that commuting in a bus or car just doesn’t have, for me anyway. At least with walking I get some exercise, and it isn’t as costly as driving.

Hmmm.

So far, I’ve sat in on Access Database Design, Fundamentals of Web Development, and I’m in the middle of a full day class on PowerPoint 2003. I have two goals: First, to learn from the teaching style of the instructors, and, second, to get a sense of what these courses cover, as I’ll probably be teaching them eventually.

Speaking of teaching, I have my first class on Monday: Excel 2003 – Level 1. I’ve spent about a day and a half looking over the material and visualizing how the class will go.

One really big difference is that my day is much more consistent. My job, as I understand it, is to teach technology courses. So, managing a business, working with clients, prospecting for new work, and actually managing projects and doing the design, development, and consulting work are all no longer things I do.

I hope that after I get more class-time, I’ll feel comfortable shifting my focus away from prepping for classes and be able to focus some on developing new courses or refining existing ones. At least something to add some variety to the work. Who knows what else could be done? Well, my coworkers most likely – my concerns are so short-term right now I can barely see past the next couple weeks.