What a week! I’ve written five articles. Another two are due for Monday. I’ve done my usual Patch Monday podcast. I’ve done five radio appearances on five different topics. I’ve been interviewed for Phil Dobbie’s BTalk podcast, and that’ll appear next week.

I’ve even been interviewed by an anthropologist for his PhD project. I’m talking to a new editor about more writing. And even — this is weird — to a television production company about a TV project.

That all comes after a month or, really, six weeks or more of travel, intense work, intense and deeply personal events and the tightly-tangled ball of stress, depression and anxiety that can trigger. Which it did.

I’m knackered.

And there’s still plenty of work to do and decisions to make over the next couple of weeks.

I mention all this for a variety of reasons…

• While I do have Weekly Wrap posts, I’ll also do individual posts linking to things like major articles and radio spots. This should make it easier for people to find things they’re interested in, and quite frankly it’s better Google juice. It also gives me more of an opportunity to reflect on each item — like adding a quick personal view to supplement a story that was a straight-news piece.
• There’s about to be a flurry of small posts as I process the week’s radio spots. Consider that a warning.
• I wanted to post at least part of the background before more reflective posts started appearing. I haven’t written much from a deeply personal perspective lately — certainly not like the essays that I was doing a couple years back. This is part of the head-clearing process before I return to that.

I write in so many places these days — ZDNet Australia, Crikey, Technology Spectator, ABC’s The Drum, even occasionally at places like CRN Australia. And, as I mentioned, there’s probably more to come. That’s all writing for other people.

This here is my place, and it’ll be about writing for me.

No, I’m not sure what form that’ll take.

I’m not sure what it even means.

Do those bullet points flow from the intro? No, not really. But that’s where my head is this morning. I’m sure things will become clearer as the day unfolds.

[Photo: That's me (embiggen) photographed with my webcam just now at Rosella Cottage, the somewhat bigger house that's the "family home" of the owners of Bunjaree Cottages. It isn't normally rented out to punters. I've been here at the cottages alone for a week, and I haven't bothered shaving. I'm staring to look like I did before ’Pong and I shot that short film The Shave back in 2008. It's not a good look.]

I don’t often write about personal stuff. Not truly personal stuff. But as the year clocks over into 2011 I am thoroughly, deeply, personally stressed and afraid. And I’m not handling it very well.

I have to find a new home in the next four weeks.

At the end of November the property manager did that thing they’re allowed to do in New South Wales: cancel a continuing lease with no stated reason giving just 60 days notice. In this case I think it’s just so they can bump up the rent more than they could get away with through an incremental increase on our continuing lease.

There’s a distinct shortage of affordable rental property in Sydney, and the timing is lousy. Freelancers like me don’t earn any money across the holidays, so January is the worst time of the year to need extra money — and before you ask, no, I don’t have any cash reserves or any available credit. Long story, but the short version is that I’m actually quite poor.

So there’s a very real risk that I won’t be able to find anything appropriate for me and the cats. Or, more importantly, I won’t have the cashflow to do anything about it in the first place.

And that means, potentially, some really dreadful temporary accommodation that I hate, with the cats in boarding and my stuff in storage and a fairly swift descent into depression. I’ve been there before and it’s not pleasant.

I’m going to see if I can move the date back another four weeks, which should create time for the January income to arrive. If not, well, I’m screwed.

If you happen to know someone in Sydney with a suitable property, do let me know. I’m hoping to stay in Sydney’s inner west, and ideally in Enmore or an adjacent suburb.

And no, I don’t think I should be sharing house with anyone. I’m not sure that I’m a particularly good person to live with.

There’s other things on my mind too. I’ve decided that my working life is spread across too many different kinds of things at the moment, and I need to simplify. And I’ve only really just started to get used to ’Pong not being here, given that he departed for Bangkok only last month even though we actually broke up a year ago. But I’ll get to them in further posts.

Before Project TOTO takes me to Tanzania — in just 20 hours — I had to get ActionAid Australia‘s blogs online. Done! With, oh, hours to spare!

Stressed much? Oh yes!

Archie@ActionAid is the new personal blog of CEO Archie Law. His first post, From Melbourne to New York, Phnom Penh, Johannesburg and back, reveals his not-very-secret musical background and why he’s dedicated a good chunk of his life to the international humanitarian and development sector.

It’s Archie’s first entrance into the blogosphere so, please, have a read and let him know what you’d like to hear about. You can also follow Archie on Twitter.

If you’re interested in the technical details, read on…

It’s built in WordPress MU, the multi-user version of WordPress, which means it’s easy for us to add further blogs coming off the top-level ActionAid blogs site. I used the excellent Tarski theme — the same one I use for my own site — with a custom stylesheet to shift it towards the look’n'feel of their main website.

People have been asking whether I’m excited about my trip to Africa. To be perfectly honest, I’m not.

Or at least not yet.

Project TOTO is still too abstract. There’s no firm dates, there’s no clear itinerary and, from a project management point of view, no clearly defined goals. Not because the project isn’t happening or doesn’t have support or isn’t being planned properly, but simply because that detailed conversation with ActionAid Australia about priorities has yet to take place.

That conversation is scheduled for this coming Friday 12 June.

Meanwhile, I’ve had many, many things on my mind. Most of them are completely unrelated to Project TOTO. But all of them have conspired to make the last three weeks extremely stressful indeed.

That’s one reason why my last video diary was back on 21 May. That’s a screenshot at the top of this post. I’m looking tired, eh? And I’ve been even more stressed since.

It’s time to catch up. So, even though this is the Queen’s Birthday holiday, here’s a rambling update. With some pictures.

What can I confirm about Project TOTO today?

• The destination country is definitely Tanzania.
• I’ll be leaving some time in the next month, probably sooner.
• I’ll be in-country for a week.
• I’ll spend some time in ActionAid’s office in Dar es Salaam, but I’ll also be visiting some of their field projects — places like those in the photos. No running water. Dodgy electricity. But, I’m told, there’s decent mobile phone coverage in 70% of these rural villages.
• My goals will include setting up a “field blogging outpost” and also reporting on my experiences along the way.

That last point is causing a bit of stress.

One media release talked about a “live video outpost in the remote region, training the local community to use it”. That’s one hell of an ask.

Live video at Ustream quality, which is what I use for Stilgherrian Live, requires a 400 kilobit per second uplink. Even here in Sydney’s inner suburbs, that’s available only if you’ve got a hard-wired ADSL2+ or cable connection (typically a 1Mb/s uplink) or Telstra’s Next G mobile broadband tuned for HSUPA (ditto). None of the other mobile broadband providers can deliver.

In Tanzania, there’s 1Mb/s DSL in Dar es Salaam, but that’ll have a maximum uplink speed of 128kb/sec. If we’re lucky. Outside the city we’re essentially at dial-up speeds or worse, either on overloaded DSL or whatever data links the mobile carriers can provide.

Even the new Thuraya satellite phones (pictured) only deliver 9.6kb/s. Thuraya does have a laptop-sized data terminal which can deliver 144kb/s — but I’m getting conflicting reports about Dar es Salaam and the south of Tanzania being in their coverage area for data.

One reason I dropped the video diaries is that a 5-minute video can be more than 40Mb of data. Imagine uploading that over dodgy dial-up!

Time is a factor here.

Once I’ve thought about what to say, recorded the video, compressed it and uploaded it, that’s an hour out of my day. Is that the best use of my time when only 124 people have watched the first episode (as of today) compared with 2000+ reading the words?

(And consider that in the same period, more than 15,000 read my article Fisting Twitter and the birth of “trend fisting” — though they may have been looking for something slightly different.)

If I’m going to produce any worthwhile media out of Tanzania, something that isn’t the usual clichés, I’ll need time to reflect.

OK, I’m stressed about other things too. But I’m conscious that ActionAid is investing significant resources (for them) and trying something new (for them). ActionAid Australia, despite four decades of experience as Austcare, is now the new kid on the block. Doubtless they’re fearful of failure. As a result, so am I.

Very fearful.

Now a typical 500-word Crikey article takes an hour or two to write, as does a post like this if I’m preparing photos. A reflective, insightful essay or feature article can take half a day. A liveblog like Gonzo Twitter 1: Saturday Evening in Newtown unfolds in real time over a couple of hours, but you have to be relaxed and “in the zone” for it to work. Unreliable Bangkok 3: Bureaucracy was based on an entire day’s experiences, and only emerged weeks later.

What if there’s so many things happening that the Muse is not with me?

That’s why TV sports coverage is so banal. The swimmer has just exerted himself to the utmost and broken the 400m record. He’s barely emerged from the pool. The adrenalin is surging through his brain. And yet we stick a microphone into his face and expect him to say something meaningful. There’s a reason the Australian Institute of Sport trains its athletes to have the clichés ready, and a reason those clichés — and only those clichés — roll out.

How will I balance the demands of producing this sort of material with, you know, “setting up a live video outpost in the remote region, training the local community to use it”?

What if I get to a remote village and discover that I’ve forgotten some key component? It’s not like I can just nip down the shop!

How will I avoid being yet another white bloke rolling into town telling the locals what to do?

There.

That’s all out of my system now. While the non-TOTO stresses have not subsided, at least I feel that I’ve accomplished something today. And now I can take a break and tackle my presentation for the SoGiKII Law, Communication Technologies and Culture Conference.

Which is tomorrow.

But starting tomorrow I’ll try to gradually shift into a regular daily pattern of posting photos and writing. Wish me luck. And perhaps ask me questions and stuff that I can answer in future posts.

[Photos: Tanzanian village photos courtesy ActionAid Australia. All rights reserved.]

When I first compared this enlightened approach to people-management with the drive-them-harder style of Jason Calacanis, it triggered a massive debate, and I wrote a follow-up comparing the Calacanis approach to an evil cult. Last week 37signals reckoned that urgency is poisonous.

One thing I’ve come to realize is that urgency is overrated. In fact, I’ve come to believe urgency is poisonous. Urgency may get things done a few days sooner, but what does it cost in morale? Few things burn morale like urgency. Urgency is acidic.

Emergency is the only urgency. Almost anything else can wait a few days. It’s OK. There are exceptions (a trade show, a conference), but those are rare.

When a few days extra turns into a few weeks extra then there’s a problem, but what really has to be done by Friday that can’t wait for Monday or Tuesday? If your deliveries are that critical to the hour or day, maybe you’re setting up false priorities and dangerous expectations.

If you’re a just-in-time provider of industry parts then precise deadlines and deliveries may be required, but in the software industry urgency is self-imposed and morale-busting. If stress is a weed, urgency is the seed. Don’t plant it if you can help it.

I can’t agree more. A client phoned once, all a’fluster about an “emergency”. Before I could think, I blurted out the question, “Why? Whose life is in peril?”

Of course no-one was in danger. This client was operating in crisis mode, as usual: that anti-pattern also known as “firefighting mode”: “Dealing with things only when they become a crisis, with the result that everything becomes a crisis.” I’ve written about that before here and with my colleague Zern Liew.

Starting today I’ll focus more of my time on “media stuff” rather than “IT stuff”. I’ll include Internet-related media in the mix, but I’ll phase out the time I spend farting around with other people’s computers. I’m interested in computers and the Internet as tools to achieve my own goals, not fixing other people’s tools. I hope to get all the hands-on IT stuff off my plate by the end of September.

This “media stuff” includes quite a few projects, some of which have been slowly incubating for years. There’s 3 book concepts (one of which would also make a good TV series), a set of 6 short films, a piece of music and a couple of things which will take the form of blogs. These will start being developed under the (probable) name Skank Media — more of that one day very soon.

I must admit, I’ve been longing to return to my media roots for ages. It feels good to see a coherent plan emerging to achieve just that.

So what happens to the existing business?

I still want to work with small businesses and their information systems — but by helping them make better use of emerging Internet technologies. And doing that within a planned framework — not just responding to failures or ad hoc requests. We may still provide IT support services, or that might be outsourced, but it certainly won’t be me worrying about misbehaving printers or crawling under desks fixing cables.

My friend and colleague Zern Liew developed a 3-point to-do list which is a delightful example of simplicity:

1. Don’t take on any new clients of the wrong sort. Knowing that you can say “Sorry, I don’t do that any more” is immensely empowering.
2. Work out how to transition the existing clients. That’s what I’m working on today, and I hope to have contacted every existing Prussia.Net client by the end of business tomorrow.
3. Start the new business. Well, there’s a lot under that one point. And there’s actually two businesses to think about: Skank Media and whatever Prussia.Net evolves into. But it puts the focus onto the future, not the past.

I feel really good about this. My target mix for the rest of this month is 20 hours per week billable time on IT and Internet work for existing clients, 10 hours on redeveloping Prussia.Net and 10 hours on Skank Media. Plus the usual extra 10 or 15 or 20 hours on making everything else work. I’ll report back on Friday evening.

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.

That’s Wilde.

Yesterday we ruffled a client’s feathers. We were invited to tender for a web development project. Our response was, in essence, “Yeah we’re interested — but not if you’re going to do it that way. We don’t think that’ll work because [reasons]. We strongly recommend doing it [some other way]. Before we go any further, is it cool for us to tender that way, knowing that’s not what you asked for? Oh, and here’s the keys to our intranet, so you can see the dialog which led to this conclusion.”

Bang!

Someone’s worldview was gunned down ruthlessly! Politely, but we did use phrases like “high-risk death march”.

Now I should say that one of us worked with this client for almost a decade and the other has worked with them on two projects in the last year. So our comments were based on some knowledge of the organisation and its needs as well as our own professional opinions. Nevertheless, what we said was shocking.

I’ve always wondered why clear, direct communication is so rare in business. People seem almost afraid to say what they mean. “Don’t upset the client!” So a recommendation like “Process A is dangerous and you should change that immediately or risk almost certain failure” becomes a mealy-mouthed “Is everyone happy with the assumptions relating to Process A?”

All urgency is drained away. The project continues flying serenely towards the looming mountain.

But don’t upset the client.

If your recommendation is for major change, when do you broach the subject? Sign up to the “wrong” concept of the project and then try to change it? Leave it until people have spent more time going down the wrong path, and the deadline is closer? No, something so important should be communicated as soon as possible.

Organisations aren’t used to people speaking quite so directly. When it happens, it’s like a splash of iced water into the face. And sometimes, that splash into alertness is precisely what’s needed.