One of our aims for participants on the Digital Action Plan is to help form digital habits and some ongoing curiosity.
People often ask: ‘how can I stay on top of all this stuff?’ The short answer is: you can’t, really. But there are other people who are great at identifying trends, inspiring ideas and case studies. A bit of effort is needed initially, to find people who you think are interesting and who you respect for their knowledge. Then you need to find a way to keep up with what they’re saying, which suits the rhythm of your week.
Reading
Here are a few people I read regularly, and the way in which I keep up with them:
- Ben Whitelaw’s Everything in Moderation newsletter
Ben’s newsletter is a succinct and essential round-up of everything related to how engagement between and within online communities is changing. From how platforms are managing user content through to the dynamics of communities, this has it all. - James Whatley’s newsletter
The other newsletter. James is a bit of a force around all things digital and prolific across all sorts of channels. You can read his slide decks, tweets, blog posts and listen to podcasts. However, his email newsletter is a neat summary of useful case studies, trends and tech news. There’s a fair few film reviews too: read or skip over depending on whether you like cinema too. - My ‘inspiring tweets’ list
To give a little bit of structure to the time I spend on Twitter, I keep a list of people whose tweets I find reliably inspiring, energising, or who often link to interesting articles. I get a lot of energy and some good ideas from this list, and it helps turn what could be a random scrolling session in to a fairly useful part of the day.
Experimenting
Sometimes, I’ll read about a tool or channel that I think might be useful to include in people’s Action Plans. Obviously I need to know how it works, and feel confident using it. That helps me understand how it might work in a corporate context, even if I don’t particularly take to it personally.
However, if I download an app, the chances are it’ll sit on my phone, untouched and taking up memory. Therefore, I have a little rule about the home screen on my phone: this is reserved for apps that I’m using all the time, plus a few ‘experiments’. Leaving them here prompts me to have a play around when I have a few minutes to spare.
How do you like to keep up to date with digital developments? Tweet us with your suggestions.
At Helpful Digital, we also publish a round up of Helpful Links each month, collating the news and interesting articles we’ve shared within our team.