Another Digital Adventure
Many of the AssistU VAs contributed to Stacy Brice’s book, “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby,” a couple of years ago, and one of my secret passions came out; I’m a digital scrapbooker. (That almost seems like an affliction. Maybe it is! ) I’ve used several programs and had to do work-arounds to print the page sizes (12 x 12, and 8 x 10). This was tedious.
Typical of all things technical, the digital scrapbooking world improved, and I bought another program a year ago. It was in it’s infancy at that time, and I saw the potential but wasn’t jazzed enough to drop my other programs. Fast forward a year…everything has changed. The program of a year ago now has an abundance of add-ons and kits, papers, embellishments, all coordinating with the traditional paper scrapbooking world. There are experts, webinars, forums, and there’s even a facebook group with more than 10,000 - yes, 10,000 members. So while I’ve been sleeping, thinking the product was mediocre, at best, the giant has awakened.
This digital program does far more than scrapbooks. It’ll do greeting cards, book marks, wall posters and much more. The end products can be individual pages, photo prints, hard-bound books from 7.5 x 7.5 to 12 x 12, with full-color bleed covers and pages…. I’ll stop so you can take a peak.
You’re probably guessing what I’m eluding to, so go ahead and take a look at the reason for my excitement.
I think it’s a perfect sideline for a very digital and creative VA. I plan to teach it (did you know I love training?) and offer creative assistance as a sideline.
Let me know what you think, but don’t “rain on my parade.” I really am excited about this and can see the fun this will bring to me and others who are creative techies like me.
“Making It All Work”
I’ve spent a good part of this past weekend reading David Allen’s latest book, Making It All Work. David is the bestselling author of Getting Things Done (GTD) and the related GTD Outlook Add-in, which I’ve been using for a few years now. Once in a while I make the mistake of trying another system of organization and task management, and I always go back to GTD. I like David’s five-step work flow model: Collect, Process, Organize, Review and Do, and I really appreciate the Add-in that allows me to manage all aspects of that model through Outlook. His newest book addresses (in depth) project planning and management, elimination of distractions (is this really possible?), and gaining focus, control, and perspective. If you haven’t read Getting Things Done, do and then read Making It All Work. If you’d like to learn more about this productivity system, check out the GTD web site.
What’s a Wiki?
A recent class on social media offered to graduates of AssistU was so rich in content that I just HAD to share a small piece of it. We’ve all heard and accepted Wikipedia as a web-version of an encyclopedia, albeit written by just about anybody. But, what’s a Wiki? The best answer I’ve found is in this video by CommonCraft. By the way, he/they have several great videos on anything and everything related to social media, including blogs, podcasts, RSS, online photo sharing, Google Docs, Twitter and much more.
