"Working with home"
Esther Perel makes the important distinction of modern times.
I heard or read it somewhere. The distinction of working with home. I don’t know where I read it—but as someone spending the majority of a professional life working remotely or FROM home I thought—I Got This. We or many of us either were or had to adapt to working from home.
But that was an expired lexicon from a different time. Make no mistake about it—we are working WITH home.
Let me insert this podcast with Esther Perel. I seem to hear her voice so often I can’t pin point where she mentioned we are working “with” home but I think it is brilliant. Who is she?
Fluent in nine languages, Perel's celebrated TED Talks have garnered more than 28 million views and her bestselling books have been translated into nearly 30 languages.
People that are usually going about their “out of the house” lives are lurking into my office to ask about breakfast. This photo was captured on film because I was teaching a data literacy workshop when my college freshman—part of the COVID-19 college diaspora—roams around our kitchen instead of the fully stocked campus commissary. He had no idea I was filming because he was texting me.
The uptick in porch deliveries means more barking at random times throughout the day.
No face to face conference presentations require a new way of sharing expertise or connecting. It isn’t all bad although I miss traveling. As CEO of my own company I travel where important conversations are happening. Often to Washington, DC but I had Portugal on the schedule and a handful of other speaking opportunities grounded with the arrival of a pandemic.
I wanted to share 3 tools that have made this transition a blessing in disguise. Now that we have to balance so much—aren’t some of us teaching kids in the next room, caring for parents, or cooking more than we thought humanly possible?
The name of the new game is efficiency.
Loom In the past, I scheduled webinars or workshops to share skills or insights. I am grateful for the Zoom interface but by equal measure—profoundly uninspired. Loom is free if you have a light use-case or need for asynchronous or “just in time” communication. You can use it and see if the juice is worth the squeeze.
Descript If you are still living in the Zoom world I want to make a “use case” for Descript. Also free for minimal use but so worth upgrading once you see what you can accomplish. I am talking to the “ummmers” and “uh” crowd. Although Descript seems pitched to the podcast crowd—it is amazingly easy to edit any audio or audio/video simply by editing the transcript. Are you podcast curious? Speak into a microphone and record. Boom. I use it to edit my loom videos. It automatically detects the loom format in the background and with one click you can edit your video without any complicated tech “know how”. You are welcome.
Oops. I almost forgot the best part! You can teach the software your voice—and add text edits by overdub into your video or audio. I read only about 30 minutes of text (they provided Wizard of Oz) to train the system. It is eerily accurate.
ArcGIS Wow. Simply wow. In the past, my data exploration involved Tableau or Python to understand the shape and scope of my data. It still does but as someone working with Census data—my mapping has simplified exponentially and I continue to learn every day. Free options and generous trials are invitations to add GIS to your data exploration with many pre-existing “living layers” to quickly get you to discovery mode.
Stay tuned for videos stepping you through ArcGIS. If you have a specific topic you would like to see—let me know. Otherwise we will likely explore CENSUS or population level patterns.
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