A friend just pointed me towards this great article in Inc. on business writing. It made me chuckle and then groan as I thought about my website. I think somewhere in the mix I am a “solutions provider”.

From the article:

What’s bad, boring, and barely read all over? Business writing. If you could taste words, most corporate websites, brochures, and sales materials would remind you of stale, soggy rice cakes: nearly calorie free, devoid of nutrition, and completely unsatisfying.

Sometimes I think that you need an outside set of eyes to see how to present things in an engaging way – if you are too close to the topic you can’t always see the bigger picture. “Can’t see the forest for the trees” and all that shtick.

Enjoy the read and I think you’ll be joining me as I go off to purchase some Saddleback leather.

If you have been wandering around the website lately, you’ll note that my telephone number and other contact details have gone missing.

Don’t panic.

I’m still here, but I’m in moving mode! My husband and I have decided to make some changes in our lives and we are moving back to Saskatchewan!! I am pretty excited about this move, which I hope will be completed over the summer – but if you phoned me now, you would get a lovely message directing you to the website that I am using to sell my house.

Email is still the best contact method, although I am migrating my privately hosted domain email into Google Apps starting this week. I don’t foresee any hiccups during the email transition.

Knock on wood and cross your fingers for me!

I’m also planning on getting a SK-based cellphone soon, which will become the primary Harms and Company Consulting telephone line. Since my husband smashed my last smart phone, I am debating about whether to go blackberry, iPhone or an android phone. SaskTel says that they’ll be supporting an iPhone by July, but that rural network coverage will be patchy. I don’t plan to live in Saskatoon so this might be a big problem for me.  Choices, choices.

I’ve always been a list-maker. My poor husband shudders when he sees me in list-making mode. Invariably some items on the list get done and others don’t. Why?

I’ve always used my list making as a brain dump or a mind-sweep. A list of every wishful whim that I have at the moment, peppered with meatier “have to dos” and “NEED to dos”. I’ve never really thought about it in detail, but there was always a prioritization process that occurred when reviewing the list and the stuff that never got done was chucked out as unimportant or irrelevant at the moment (or shifted to the next list).

I’ve been taking a course since January that has been causing me to rethink a lot about what I do, who I am and where I want to be going. One of the ideas within the course is that we are constantly filtering the world around us. The analogy used in the course was that a person uninterested in sports will unconsciously filter all inputs relating to sports out of their awareness, however someone who is interested in sports will be more aware of any and all inputs around them that pertain to sports. I’m sure that everyone has experienced this in their everyday life, have you ever started thinking about something and then started seeing that thing everywhere? Did that thing just enter your universe or were you previously unaware that it was always there?

Jo VanEvery recently had a post about planning, organizing and goal setting. In it, she shows a clothesline holding her to do list as a way to identify and focus on the tasks at hand. This is a much more visual and artistic way to manage ‘the list’ than my notebook (especially with the multiple coloured pieces of paper), but I’ve just learned that there is an actual term for what we are both doing. Mark Forster’s Autofocus system is a mechanism for prioritizing your never-ending to do list in a notebook format – which might be more amenable for the less artistic ones among us (like me). Coupling this technique with David Seah’s Emergent Task Planner (which I learned about in my course) – delivers an exceptionally powerful tool kit to organize your tasks and help get things done. I’m still learning these tools and trying to put them into practice, but I’m pretty excited about the results I am seeing thus far.

Back in November I mentioned that I hoped to get some sanity back into my life and schedule in December. Well, I had a brief break between Christmas and New Year and then things got busy again. I can’t believe that it is already March and I haven’t been blogging for over three months.

Lots of things have been happening, not the least of which is the 2010 Canadian budget. Last year I was pretty active in this discussion, but since I’m already late to the party – all I’ll do is point you towards Rob Annan’s thorough review on Don’t Leave Canada Behind. I’m not sure that I consider this budget a great one, but it is certainly much better than last year.

I’m still not sure if I will be doing more blogging in the near term, but I thought that I would throw up a post to show that I’m still kicking around.

Catch you sooner or later.

Another year, another NSERC DG deadline past. Phew. I’m already on to my next deadline(s) and hopefully shall see the light of day (and my family) in December. (Reading between the lines here, you may (correctly!) presume that posts will remain few and far between over the coming weeks.)

While I’ve put blogging on the backburner in the near term, because I have so much other material to write, I’m still reading (an important thing that everyone needs to do to improve their writing). Yesterday I came across this great article and I just had to share.

In The Scientist, Grant wrote “Right your Writing“, a nice exploration of how to improve your scientific writing and communication skills (and productivity). The primary focus is on writing manuscripts for journals, but most of the tips are relevant to any non-fiction prose including grant applications. The article also includes examples of how you can sharpen your writing techniques and provides suggestions for further reading (for those so inclined).