I know that you are supposed to like or love people based on their character or their soul, but that shit takes a lot of time to figure out. It’s much more efficient to quickly categorize people as loveable, likeable or deeply suspicious based on their surface traits.

Like many people, I have a few such heuristics, so I might as well come clean about them:

*Friends I’ve had since before there were cell phones are grandfathered in, and exempt from this standard.

Of course, now that I’ve confessed to these little prejudices, it’s now possible to game your way into my heart. But hey, why not jump in with me: what are the weird little signs that let you instantly know when you’re going to like someone?

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Are you tired of listening to your kids argue? Does it seem like a single ill-timed comment can ignite a cascade of escalating attacks and complaints? Are you sick of playing referee?

This weekend we came up with an innovative strategy for stopping the sibling conflict cycle. To implement this plan, you need:

1. One or more iPhones
2. Two or more conflict-prone children who are familiar with said iPhone
3. A household in which Apple CEO Tim Cook is a familiar character

Still with me? If you’re one of the seven people in the world who answered yes, then here’s our story.

We told the kids Tim Cook asked us to beta test the next generation of Apple voice recognition. It can synthesize someone’s voice, and block what they’re actually saying, and replace it with the phrase of your choice.

Apple thinks this can be a powerful tool for conflict resolution and for business, we explained. But since they don’t want to test it only for making conflicts go away, they made us promise that just as often, we’d use the tech to create conflicts.

So if you hear your sister saying something nasty, assume it’s actually our beta technology, synthesizing her voice and blocking out what she is really saying. And if your brother says something rude, it’s probably just a synthesized comment coming from the iPhone.

I’ll admit it: the kids were skeptical. But they were intrigued enough to run some tests, and quickly became more interested in the logic of our supposed alpha test than they were in responding to successive taunts. As is so often the case, their skepticism had to do battle with the kid inclination to fully buy into any imaginary scenario.

So on reflection, I should probably add a fourth item to my list of ingredients:

4. A dedicated savings fund for your children’s future psychotherapy.

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If you have young kids, Father’s Day preparations in your house probably look a lot like they do in ours: shopping for a present, lecturing the kids to let Daddy sleep in,  and surreptitiously assembling various Dad-themed school projects (I am never more grateful to my kids’ teachers than when I realize they’ve spared me the nightmare of nagging the kids to make a gift.)

I look at Father’s Day as the one day when I am pretty much guaranteed to stop and give one Rob Cottingham the celebration and credit he is due for being, truly, the world’s most fantastic father. I know there are lots of you out there who would contest that assertion, but as anyone who has seen Rob with his kids can attest, he’s pretty extraordinary. Yes, he does the cool fun dad stunts like cartooning pictures of the kids or switching into some crazy character for hours on end, but he is also the parent who makes sure that they actually get fed and go to sleep. Wow.

Father’s Day is so completely defined for me by Rob that it is only once I see people updating Facebook with joyful memories and wishes of their own fathers that I remember, hey, I had a dad too. I was raised almost entirely by my mom, which is why Father’s Day didn’t seem like it had a whole lot to do with me until Rob and I started our own family.

But I did in fact have a father, although one I never lived with, and only saw intermittently while I was growing up. He was an unusual man: a brilliant academic who published many books and taught himself Chinese as a retirement project, but who also loved to spend his days on a tractor, tending to the farm that was his great passion. Even more unusual was his family life: he was married four times, with a total of nine different kids, and had very different relationships to each of us.

For most of my life, his relationship with me was a great disappointment, which is why Father’s Day always catches me by surprise in a slightly painful way. Thanks to about a decade of therapy and a lovely novel by Stephen McCauley, I had more or less accepted that disappointment, and didn’t expect much to change.

But about ten years ago, my dad began the process of building the relationship we had never had. (A large part of the credit for this goes to his fourth wife, who is now a very dear friend.) He started calling me regularly, and actually remembering my birthday, and even came out to Vancouver for a visit. He started talking to me about how his life and our relationship had unfolded, and about the life choices that had shaped that path.

And most painfully, but also most helpfully, he talked about his regrets, and the choices he wished he had made differently. Particularly once he was diagnosed with the cancer that ultimately killed him, he worked hard to be candid with both me and (much harder) with himself. It was extraordinary to witness someone look back at his life, and realize that he had truly hurt people who mattered to him.

Seeing his regret didn’t make the disappointments of my childhood go away, or magically heal the various parts of my personality that will always reflect his absence. But it helped me realize how profoundly I would feel my strengths and shortcomings as a parent. We have a relatively short window in which to do right by our kids, and a relatively long period in which we live with the knowledge of our success or failure.

While failures can’t be erased, they can be redeemed. The fact that my father actually tried to be a father to me, however late, was one of the happiest surprises of my life. I’ll still never be one of those people who thinks of Father’s Day as being about my dad — it is, and will always be, about my kids’ dad — but I’m grateful to have happy memories of my father, and to feel some sense of peace around our complicated relationship.

What I really want to say is this: if you’re not the parent you want to be, it’s not too late. It’s not too late to be a better father, or a better mother, even if you don’t think you’ll ever be the parent your kids deserve. Even if your kids are grown. You may still fall short, but better is better.

In fact, you’re guaranteed to fall short: I don’t know one parent who would tell you that yeah, they’re doing it perfectly. What matters is to actually try. Because if there’s one thing I learned from my Dad, it’s that you don’t want to live with the knowledge that you didn’t.

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This morning’s breakfast conversation:

ME: I’m feeling upset about how Barack Obama has been reading all the stuff we’ve been posting online — everywhere except Twitter, which refused to cooperate.

SWEETIE: That’s creepy.

ME: Good news, though — I blogged your list of feature ideas for Apple.

PEANUT: Will Barack Obama read that, too?

ME: I have to post that.

SWEETIE: Well, post it on Twitter, so Barack Obama won’t read it.

ME: It’s tough to fit that into 140 characters.

SWEETIE: Try, because I don’t want Barack Obama seeing that.

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For the past couple of years, our kids’ favorite bedtime stories have featured a feline protagonist whose best friend is Apple CEO Tim Cook. In each story, Tim Cook teleports this cat to Cupertino (Apple HQ), where Tim and cat work on various cat-friendly inventions. Naturally, tonight’s story centred on an emergency visit from Tim Cook, requesting the cat’s help with an iOS update that could be announced at the WWDC.

As with most of these stories, the best ideas came from the kids themselves. First, however, they demanded to know what iOS is, and what an operating system is, and what the difference is between the OS and the apps that run on it (I know, I know, we’ve been terrible parents for neglecting this explanation until now). Once they had the basics under their belt, however, they came up with awesome feature ideas for the next iOS:

1. Divide your iPad into zone so four people can use the iPad screen at once.
2. Use your iPhone/iPad camera to identify any object: for example, hold a rock up to the camera and it will tell you what kind of rock it is.
3. If you delete an app, it remains on the device as a ghost image; swiping brings the app back. [ed. note to Apple: please require a parent's password before restoring the delete apps.I]
4. Stream any app you are using to a Mac so you can use it with full keyboard/mouse controls.
5. Filter that automatically detects where the fingerprints are on your iPad, and automatically adjusts the brightness of different patches of your screen in order to compensate and make them invisible (OK, that might have been my idea, but it still owes a big debt to my kids’ sticky fingers).
6. Tell Siri your food preferences; she’ll remember them and in the future, suggest restaurants that would appeal to you.
7. If you are at a friend’s house, your iPad will automatically join their wifi network, and once you’re on their wifi network, you can try any of your friend’s iOS apps for free.
8. Ask Siri for a 3D printer and money printer; it will automatically upgrade itself to print the money you need to pay for the 3D printer and money printer.

That last one kind of broke my brain to think about, but other than that, I’m prepared to put the kids in charge of the iOS development team. Tim Cook, they await your call.

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Do you feel like you could get more out of Twitter? Or are you a passionate Twitter user who wants to help your colleagues, friends and family use it and love it the way you do?

Work Smarter with Twitter and HootSuite is for everyone who wants to get more out of Twitter, whether as a newcomer or a longtime user who wants to make smarter, more strategic use of this platform. The second in my Work Smarter with Social Media series for Harvard Business Review Press, this short guide focuses on how Twitter can help you build the strong, meaningful relationships that can support your work and your career.

And I’d like to ask for your help spreading the word about this new ebook. Please buy a copy for yourself or as a gift for a colleague or a friend (it’s the perfect way to help that Twitter newbie or skeptic get serious about how to use Twitter). Once you’ve had a chance to take a look at the book yourself, I’d be delighted if you would post a review on Amazon, iTunes or Goodreads.

My community of Twitter pals has been a constant source of inspiration and encouragement in the writing of this book — in fact, in all my writing for the past five years. If we’ve ever exchanged so much as a tweet, believe me when I say that you are part of the extraordinary experience of Twitter that I tried to capture in this title. Thank you for helping make Twitter such a valuable part of my own professional practice, and for any help you can provide in tweeting, blogging or otherwise sharing news about this new ebook.

Where to find it

• On Amazon
• On iTunes
• On the Harvard Business Review site

To jump into the conversation on Twitter and Facebook

• my Twitter handle: @awsamuel
• hashtag: #wswths
• Facebook page for the book

Tweetable links

Click to tweet this: New ebook from @harvardbiz: Work Smarter with #Twitter and @HootSuite, by my friend @awsamuel. http://amzn.to/wswevernote

Click to tweet this: How can #Twitter and @HootSuite build your professional relationships? Find out in @awsamuel’s new ebook. http://amzn.to/wswtwitter

Click to tweet this: I love @HootSuite! This new ebook from @harvardbiz will show you how it can help you tweet smarter, too. http://amzn.to/wswtwitter

More ways to share

If you’d like to talk about the book in more than 140 characters, here are some short descriptions that can help you get started:

You know you could make good use of Twitter — if only you had a roadmap of exactly how to use it. Now you can get that roadmap from Work Smarter with Twitter and HootSuite, the latest ebook in the Harvard Business Review Press series, Work Smarter with Social Media. It’s like looking over the shoulder of a social media pro to find out how to keep up a lively Twitter presence in just a few hours a week. In this case, you’re looking over the shoulder of Alexandra Samuel, VP of Social Media for Vision Critical, as she shows you how to use Twitter and HootSuite to build the professional relationships that can make a big difference to your work and your career.

If you have ever felt overwhelmed by Twitter, a new ebook from Harvard Business Review Press may have the cure. In Work Smarter with Twitter and HootSuite, Alexandra Samuel shows how to use Twitter lists to focus on the relationships that can really make a difference to your work and career. Her methodology relies on a multi-column Twitter client like HootSuite, which makes it possible to focus your attention on your key lists instead of on your home feed, and makes it easy to maintain your own Twitter presence with a combination of scheduled tweets and real-time conversation. Check it out here: http://amzn.to/wswtwitter

Shareable quotes

These short excerpts from the book are ready to share as summaries or sample tips:

Even Twitter enthusiasts are often paralyzed by the sheer volume of tweets and the velocity of Twitter conversations, both of which increase quickly once you follow more than a handful of people. Twitter newcomers are often so overwhelmed by Twitter’s size and pace that they tune out altogether…[T]o make the most of Twitter, you have to focus on individual people, not individual tweets….You’ll stay focused on these relationships and get away from the dilemma of “keeping up” only if you embrace Twitter not as a news site but as a social network, which is, after all, how Twitter bills itself. — from Work Smarter with Twitter and HootSuite by Alexandra Samuel (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013)

* *

Using Twitter lists means that when you take a five-minute Twitter break, you’ll be able to quickly home in on the updates from the people you really want to hear from, simply by looking at your two or three most crucial lists. When you’re taking the time for a deeper dive into the Twitterverse, you’ll see each tweet in a context that reminds you why you’re tuning in to that particular person. – from Work Smarter with Twitter and HootSuite by Alexandra Samuel (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013)

* *

Putting your top relationships into lists and streams [in HootSuite] is the key to helping you filter out the folks you don’t want to spend your time on, even if you want to keep following them out of courtesy or so that they can message you privately. If you’re scrupulous about focusing on tweets from folks in your top lists, you may be just fine following all sorts of other random feeds, secure in the knowledge that you won’t be distracted by the detritus. – from Work Smarter with Twitter and HootSuite by Alexandra Samuel (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013)

* *

If you do want to build a significant following—whether you define “significant” as a hundred thousand followers or a hundred leaders in your immediate field—you need to think about defining a focus for your tweeting that you can lead with a sustainable level of effort. If you’re willing to put in several hours a day to managing your Twitter feed (something I’d recommend for very few people), you could take on a broader topic or one that already has some serious tweeters. If you’re going to keep your Twitter time to a few hours a week, you’ll need to define a fairly narrow focus. A good way to do that is to locate your tweeting at the intersection of two or three lively fields, or a couple of fields plus a geographic location. While you may not be the top tweeter in the field of human resources, you could be the top tweeter on recruiting young people in retail (which lets you tweet a mix of content about retail, Gen Y, and recruitment) or retail recruitment in Dallas. – from Work Smarter with Twitter and HootSuite by Alexandra Samuel (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013)

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Well, folks, it’s almost that time again: Easter. Also known as the end of Lent. Or what should be known as national coming out day for all the people who’ve just spent the past 40 days doing some kind of digital fast. They inevitably come back with a desire to enlighten us with their Enormous Insight Into The Nature of Digital Existence And Everything, before they return to tweeting their latest random thoughts just like they always have.

This year, however, the calendar has afforded us a delightful opportunity: since Lent ends just before April 1, we can and should play some collective pranks on the newly re-digitized. After all, they’re not online to read what we are planning. Here are some options:

1. Invent a new YouTube meme that, like the Harlem Shake, requires you to dance like a crazy person: but this time, solo, unmasked and in your underwear. Pay for targeted online ads that tell people about the latest must-join meme as soon as they blog, tweet or Facebook the words “digital fast”.
2. Pretend that Facebook changed its privacy settings at the beginning of Lent, and all their ultra-private content has been publicly displayed on their wall for forty days without them knowing it.
3. Send them a link to the new app that everybody is using and which is going to leave them friendless and alone unless they immediately sign up, too. The sign-up form should be a web page with a sign-up form that goes exactly nowhere; clicking “submit” should tell them that they have been added to the beta wait list and will be informed when it’s their turn to join.
4. Tell them that Twitter has now extended its post length to 200 characters. Let them write their verbose tweets, and we can all mock them when their tweets get awkwardly truncated. What could be more humiliating?
5. Convince them that while they were offline, Google Reader shut down, and they will have to find some other way to access online news. This one is particularly hilarious if your digital faster accesses the Internet from within an authoritarian regime, and relies on Reader to get news from beyond the firewall. Tell them they’re now going to be limited to the same censored content as all their neighbors, and ROTFL!

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On March 20 the Senate de-funded political science grants from the National Science Foundation “except for research projects that the Director of the National Science Foundation certifies as promoting national security or the economic interests of the United States.” Since political science research, like most scientific research, is seldom undertaken to promote national security or the economic interests of the U.S., it seems doubtful there will be many such exceptions….

The amount of money saved is somewhere south of $11 million, out of a total NSF budget of about $7 billion. Cutting $11 million as part of a long-term effort to eliminate a budget deficit currently estimated at $1.1 trillion is like trying to fill an empty swimming pool by spitting into it. The real reason the NSF’s political science program is being eliminated is that Republicans are ideologically hostile to its content, not its cost.           — Political Science in the Crosshairs, The New Republic

As it happens, an NSF grant is what funded the lion’s share of my Ph.D. In my first year of graduate school, I successfully applied for the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program, which funded most of my subsequent graduate studies with tuition support and a generous stipend. (Generous by grad student standards, not by living the high life standards.)

At the time of my application, I proposed to undertake just the kind of research that (as the New Republic speculates) Republicans might find distasteful: an investigation of the decline and resurrection of social democratic parties. But pretty early in my actual course of research, I pivoted towards research on the impact of the Internet on social democracy. Eventually, the social democracy side of the equation dropped out, and I wrote a dissertation about hacktivism: the phenomenon of politically-motivated computer hacking.

In other words, my dissertation ended up landing in exactly the area this Senate resolution proposes to exempt: a topic related to the natural security interests of the United States. While I was more interested in the implications for political participation than in the implications for cybersecurity, the breadth of interviews I undertook, the case studies I developed and the conclusions I reached all meant that my research was of interest to the security community. Interesting enough, anyhow, that my perspective has been sought out over the years by folks ranging from the Rand Institute to the US Department of Defense.

Yet none of that would have been apparent back in 1996, when I thought I was writing a dissertation about social democracy. Sure, my pivot may have been more dramatic than most, and unusual in landing so directly in a security-related field. But it is not at all unusual for research agendas to evolve, and to take a researcher in a direction quite different from what was anticipated. Indeed, I would argue that good research is defined by the openness to a change in direction, and by the researcher’s willingness to recognize when the outcomes or implications of research are substantially different from ex ante hypotheses.

By proposing to limit research funding to political science projects with direct and anticipated implications for national security or economic interests, the Senate vision precludes the kind of serendipity that may in fact be the source of some of the most surprising and useful research. Even if you buy the argument that research should only get funded when it has that kind of tangible benefit — which, by the way, I don’t — this kind of policy is far from guaranteed to produce the desired results.

Quite the opposite: in encouraging academic researchers to think narrowly about the relationship between their research and the national interest, it discourages the kind of broad exploration from which innovation emerges. And that isn’t in anybody’s interest.

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1. Totally on top of all pending tasks
2. Moderate slippage of select tasks leads to mild anxiety
3. Catastrophic failure to complete one or more mission-critical tasks leads to wholesale re-evaluation of career choice, self-worth and why are we even on this earth anyhow?
4. Application of medication, coaching and/or psychotherapy scales existential crisis back to actionable item: adopt new task management system
5. All tasks put on hold for 3-14 days while documenting software requirements and researching available options
6. Software selection creates brief window for completion of most-urgent tasks
7. Installation of software across all desktop and mobile devices
8. Optional: acquisition of any additional hardware devices or accessories that are revealed to be vitally necessary [read: nifty] in light of new task management software choice
9. Troubleshooting of cloud-based cross-device task synchronization
10. Capture of top-of-mind tasks
11. Blissful peace of knowing all crucial tasks are captured
12. Hey! all this blissful peace helped me remember the 27 other tasks I keep forgetting about
13. Contact high from daily experience of checking off task checkboxes
14. Evangelization of preferred task management solution to foolish friends and colleagues with their hopelessly antiquated systems
15. Significant financial and/or temporal investment in software, workflows or custom hacks on the Best. Task. Management. System. Ever.
16. Religious daily capture and review of all current tasks
17. Religious daily capture of all potential tasks
18. Gosh there sure are a lot of tasks in there
19. Minor failure of task completion due to task management software avoidance
20. Capture of project or event-specific task list in a separate app or document, where it won’t get lost in that big, overwhelming, depressing list of tasks
21. Important tasks captured in emails to self so that they won’t get lost in the morass of recorded tasks
22. Realization that completion of task list will require 8,918 hours worth of work leads to total avoidance of task management application
23. Moderate task slippage (repeat from step #2 above)

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The brilliant Lauren Bacon made a big splash yesterday with her thought-provoking post on the emotional work that often gets assigned to women working in the tech world. The response to that post has been so massive that it’s left her with a challenge: how do you monitor and reply to the torrent of ensuing tweets?

Whether you’re trying to track and engage with public perceptions of your work, your latest blog post or your company, monitoring Twitter is an essential part of that work. It’s not enough to get Google News alerts that tell you if your company is in the news, or to read the comments on your blog; odds are good that a huge part of the conversation is going to unfold on Twitter, and that conversation may look quite different from what you see on blogs or news sites.

If everybody who was talking about you or your company was referring to you by your Twitter handle, this job would be relatively easy: you’d just monitor your mentions feed. But a lot of the time, people may be talking about you — or especially that latest blog post — without including your Twitter handle in their tweets. And if you’re trying to track the response to a blog post, in particular, they may not be mentioning you at all: the only clue that they are talking about your work is the link that’s embedded in each tweet sharing your post.

Here are three tricks for tracking and responding to the folks who are talking about you, whether or not they are mentioning you by name:

1. Monitor your name, as well as your handle. Set up a Twitter search on your name (and common misspellings thereof); if you use a multi-column Twitter client like HootSuite or Tweetdeck, add this search as as a column (a “stream”, in HootSuite-ese”). Do the same thing for your company name, senior execs’ names, etc. Keep an eye on this column and respond to it the way you’d respond to mentions. Note that if you have a common name, this could produce a lot of irrelevant results, so you may find it easier to do your search directly on Twitter where you can use “-” operators to exclude irrelevant results: for example I might set up a search on “alexandra samuel” OR “alexandra samuels” OR “alex samuel” OR “alex samuels” -”self magazine” -linux (because there’s an Alexandra Samuel at Self Magazine, and an Alex Samuel who writes about Linux).  
   
2. Monitor link backs with Topsy. If you’ve got a post that is blowing up, like Lauren’s, use Topsy to watch for any and all tweets that link to that post. For example, by entering the URL of Lauren’s post, we see these tweets:
   
   Note that Topsy finds tweets that include shortened links (e.g. bit.ly URLs) as well as those that include the full-length URL (which is unlikely to be tweeted, anyhow) so you just have to enter your full-length URL in order to track all the tweets that have shared it. When I have a post on the Harvard Business Review blog, I typically visit the Topsy trackbacks for that link several times in the first 48 hours, and then one a day for the next week or so.
3. Thank and engage with scheduled tweets. Of course, you shouldn’t be tracking all those mentions just for the sheer ego gratification (or in some cases, ego shattering) that comes from seeing what people have to say about you. The whole point of seeing all these links is to engage with them, ideally by replying to any questions or substantive comments, and perhaps by thanking some or all of the folks who have tweeted about your work. You can thank people in real time, or you can queue up a bunch of thank-yous in Buffer, an app that lets you schedule tweets on a specific schedule. You can use HootSuite for tweet scheduling, too, but as my next post will explain , using Topsy and Buffer together will turn you into tweet-thanking ninja.

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The beauty of being married to a man with absolutely no interest in sports is that I would remain blissfully unaware of the start of hockey season, at least until I get to the office Monday, were it not for Facebook and Twitter, which are suddenly overflowing with Canucks-related blah blah blah. That’s a problem that can be easily rectified in Twitter, simply by using a client that lets you filter out tweets containing certain keywords. But how to make Facebook a hockey-free zone?

The solution could be as close as the show/hide stories dropdown…if Facebook would just customize its news feed categories a little:

Which categories of news would you like to be able to hide with one click?

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“I don’t know why you care about the shit that a bunch of total strangers say about you on the Internet.”

This was my mom’s delightfully candid and potentially comforting response to this week’s comment eruption on my Harvard Business Review post. My mom is quite an extraordinary person, but her most extraordinary trait may be her almost complete imperviousness to other people’s judgements. I’ve never met anyone who is less perturbed by what other people say or think about her, and while I’m not remotely in her league, her influence is the main reason I can muster the courage to write the occasional provocative blog post.

That said, a day with 100 critical blog comments does send me to the wine bottle when I get home, and leaves me reflecting on whether it’s worth enduring an online onslaught. When people I don’t know tweet that I’m a f***ing idiot, it’s tempting to throw a little pity party, and forget that I was well aware my post was likely to elicit a strong reaction — though I anticipated strong reactions on both sides of the spectrum, as I’ve seen on Twitter, rather than the almost entirely negative pile-on that’s occurred on the HBR comment thread.

It’s even more tempting to take the comfort my mom offered: to simply write off the hostility as the inconsequential utterances of people who I don’t know, and who don’t count, because they are people I’ve never met face-to-face.

But undervaluing online interactions is the exact opposite of what I advocate every time I ask people to stop distinguishing between online life and “real life”. For our online lives to be meaningful and constructive, we have to embrace them as real. And that means embracing the critical, hostile and difficult conversations as real, too, even if it would be easier to dismiss online critics as online strangers.

The fact that I experience online interactions as very real makes a week like this a little bumpy (thus the wine). But the agony of the bumps pales in comparison to the joy that’s come with them: the joy of hearing from so many old and new friends, almost all online.

In the past two days, I’ve received Facebook messages from friends like the seasoned editor who welcomed me into the fold of writers who’ve survived reader outrage. I’ve heard from a high school friend who reminded me how much she loved my writing….all the way back to grade 7! I’ve had a call out of the blue from a former colleague I’ve stayed in touch with only through email and Twitter, encouraging me to take a break from the comment thread for the sake of my own sanity. I’ve received encouraging tweets and DMs from friends and colleagues I know well, and from people I’m connecting with for the first time through this mini-controversy. And I’ve heard from friends who love me enough not only to reach out, but to share their honest and sometimes critical responses to both my argument and the tone of the post.

It’s well established that humans pay a lot more attention to negative feedback than to positive, so it would be natural if these reminders of love and community were overshadowed by hurt or shame at being called a few names. The miracle of this week is that I’ve experienced the opposite: I’m so deeply touched by the warm messages I’ve received that the love has dramatically overshadowed the criticism.

Plowing through the occasional online shitstorm is a near-inevitable part of writing online, and I knew that this week might get windy when I wrote that post. What I manage to forget, between storms, is how much energy it takes to go though them — energy I get from the support and engagement of the people I know and love. I feel like the luckiest person in the world for having such wonderful friends and colleagues, and for living in a moment and medium that allow their loving expression to find me online across distances of time and space.

When we embrace the reality and significance of our online interactions, we not only let in the joy that comes from web-enabled love; we also start to eat at the roots of online hostility. The derogatory flames on this week’s post were the ones that read like folks had forgotten they were talking to or about a human being; the engaging comments (including a great many well-argued criticisms) were the ones that sounded like they came from real people, talking to a real person.

These real conversations are what make the Internet worth living in and engaging with, whether it’s bringing you criticism or love. Because we’re not online strangers. We’re real-life people.

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My latest blog post for Harvard Business Review has provoked a strong reaction to the idea of saying goodbye to the paper notebook. Here’s my own take on the experience of giving up on paper and pen.

4.00
22.95
Alexandra Samuel

Those 25 characters, comprising a tip, a total and a signature, now represent the lion’s share of my handwriting. That’s what I realized during a recent conversation with a colleague, when I asked how he takes notes…meaning, of course, what software program did he use. I didn’t even consider the possibility of his actual answer: a notebook. You know, a lump of paper bound together so that you can scratch at it with a pen. Yuck.

In all honesty, I have never liked holding a pen. What I hated about college exams wasn’t the studying or the race to get out the answers: it was the way my hand ached by the time I got halfway through a test. I tried The Artist’s Way but I loathed the morning pages because unlike a touch typing on a keyboard, pen-and-paper writing can’t keep up with the pace at which ideas actually flow.

As soon as I got a laptop light enough to carry, I braved the glares of my fellow conference-goers so that I could take my notes on my computer, where I could actually read them; my chicken scratch is barely legible, even to me.

Even though I took more and more of my notes on a computer, I still used paper notebooks as my day-to-day repository. After all, who can bother launching Word just to capture a phone number? Or hunting through all those folders of files just to find that brief thought you had during last week’s meeting? For these unavoidable writing situations, I carried a medium-sized, graph-ruled, hard-bound notebook, cycling through a new one every three months. Sometimes I referred back to my meeting notes or latest inspirations, but the notebooks were mostly a garbage can: a place to throw words, information and ideas, knowing that they’d get ground up and lost.

Then came VooDoopad, a one-stop notetaking program, and later, Evernote. When I started using Voodoopad in mid-2005, my notetaking was instantly transformed: instead of opening individual Word documents for each note, I could throw them all in Voodoopad. Better yet, I could actually find them, because unlike my paper notebooks, Voodoopad was both legible and searchable. Then I (regretfully, because I loved Voodoopad and its awesome developer) shifted over to Evernote, which offered features like iPhone syncing — meaning that I could access or add to my notes anytime, anywhere.

My four-notebook-a-year habit became a one-notebook-a-year habit, and my pen and moleskine might languish in my purse for days at a time. Then I’d find myself in a meeting where I couldn’t put a laptop screen between me and my client, and out the moleskine would come (if the notes were important, I’d snap them later on my iPhone and add them to Evernote). Or I’d come up with a blog post idea over dinner — along with a first paragraph I couldn’t bear to type on my iPhone keyboard — and write it down just legibly enough to transcribe into my browser as soon as I got home. Or sometimes I’d simply run out of battery life halfway through a work session, and be forced to switch to paper.

The iPad liberated me from these final use cases for my notebook. There is no meeting where I feel uncomfortable taking notes on my iPad; not only is it small enough to feel unintrusive, but typing on a touchscreen aovid the clackety-clack of a keyboard. I have beautiful Etsy purse that fits my iPad, so if I have an inspiration over dinner, my iPad is always at the ready. And unless I’ve let Little Peanut wear out my iPad watching videogame walkthroughs on YouTube (a not-infrequent problem) it’s usually there to bail me out when my laptop battery dies.

The moleskine I’m using right now — if using is the right term for it — is filled only halfway. The first page of notes are from early 2009, and at the pace I’m going, I’ll be able to use it until about 2014. (A lifespan that puts Apple products to shame: I suspect I’ll go through half a dozen iPhones, four iPads and at least two Macbooks in the same amount of time.)

With my notebook relegated to such occasional use — if memory serves, the last time I needed more than one page of it was during a blackout at the Hollyhock retreat center — it takes some real digging to think of circumstances in which I actually pick up a pen. I no longer bother to carry one, in fact, and it’s only once or twice a month that I find myself wishing I did.  I still write on our grocery list (though I’ve been thinking about replacing the pad of paper with a half-dead iPhone that would let us access our list online); I still write the occasional comments on a colleague’s document (though I prefer to load it on my iPad and annotate it there); I still need to fill in my daughter’s reading log for school (though she mostly fills it in herself because she’s still at the stage where writing a few words is a form of learning). Together, these various pen-on-paper scenarios might account for twenty or thirty words’ worth of writing each week.

And that leaves the Visa slips. I use my Visa for almost everything, which amounts to thirty or forty transactions a week: let’s call it 750 characters. I figure that’s twice as much writing as all the other scenarios put together.

Of course, my most recent Visa card has a micro-chip: more and more of the time, I enter a PIN and skip the signature altogether. 750, 650, 550…I feel the written letters slip away. With them goes the memory of my grade 3 teacher, patiently baking my first handwritten story into an “antique” manuscript. I sever the mimetic tie to the eighteen-year-old girl who filled the pages of a journal with her first heartbreak. Out of practice at reading my own scrawl, I can no longer decipher the notebook my husband and I used during our first weekend as lovers — a weekend when I lost my voice and relied entirely on writing.

These are the losses that accumulate through our transition to a new world, a new set of tools, new ways of working and new ways of remembering. At any time I could choose to pick up pen and paper once again, to forego legibility and searchability in favor of the serendipity of what gets recalled and what becomes indecipherable. But I have no romantic fantasies about sitting at a sidewalk café in Paris, sipping coffee and writing in longhand; that world is gone, or going, and my paper notebook isn’t going to reveal Paris or the world as they are today.

Instead, I picture myself at that same café, iPad in hand. It’s a lovely spot, charming and a little bit hidden, but I found my way back there because I jotted down the address in Evernote after stumbling onto it last year.  Downstairs is the same dark stone room that has served patrons for more than two hundred years; upstairs the stone is interrupted by windows big enough to let in light and wifi. And there I sit, tweeting and blogging and sharing my notes with the world in real-time.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

FROM AN EVERNOTE USER: I largely use Evernote to clip news articles, academic articles, and journal articles. I use separate Evernote notebooks for teaching, for material relevant to my book, and one for my next research project. I also created a notebook when I was writing a piece for The New Yorker about the shooting at the Sikh temple in Oak Creek. I wanted to make sure I gave proper attribution to the ideas that I was building upon, so I clipped links to analyses of media coverage of Oak Creek or details about the shooter. I didn’t want to plagiarize anything by accident, so anytime I made an argument that had been made before, I linked to it.—Naunihal Singh, assistant professor of political science, University of Notre Dame

Work Smarter with Evernote features a number of great tips like this one. One of the best parts of working on the book was hearing all the creative ways people use Evernote to be more productive, smarter and taller. (OK, maybe not taller, but possibly thinner.)

Now that I’m working on the next ebook in the series, I’m eager to hear more great stories from creative social media users. This time, I’m looking for your best examples, tricks and tactics for using Twitter or HootSuite. How do you decide who to follow? How do you read tweets and follow people? How do you structure and organize your own tweeting?

If you’ve got suggestions on how people can get more from Twitter, examples of how you’ve used Twitter or HootSuite yourself, or stories about how Twitter has rocked your world, I’d love to hear them via Twitter (to @awsamuel), in the comment thread below, or via email to alex[at]alexandrasamuel[dot]com. Thanks in advance for your help!

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

As you start the new year with the best intentions for your personal, professional and emotional development, don’t forget to put your tech life on the list. Here are 13 resolutions to choose from, depending on your own tech challenges and commitments; you’ll know which one is right from the combination of excitement and anxiety it inspires:

1. For the social networking butterfly: To think about the three to ten people you’d most like to develop stronger relationships with this year, and prioritize their news updates in your Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other social network-reading. (Lists and circles will help.)
2. For the reluctant techie: To try three new software programs or web applications, spending at least 10 hours using each one.
3. For the online shopper: To visit shopping sites only after making a specific “items needed” list, and to buy only items on that list.
4. For the Twitter junkie: To look at your follower number no more than once a month, so that you can focus on your contributions and experience rather than the number of followers you acquire.
5. For the parent: To ask your kid’s/kids’ permission before you post any photos, cute quotes, art works or stories about them.
6. For the productivity software geek: To spend 10 hours completing tasks for every 1 hour you spend playing with the box software they came in.
7. For the mobile junkie: To stop taking out your phone or tablet during a gap or wait of five minutes or less. Instead, just be. (Thank you Leda Dederich for this one.)
8. For the Internet free-loader: To contribute or upload at least one tip, answer, blog post, media file, review or offer of help for every 100 things you discover, answer or enjoy online.
9. For the early adopter: To wait at least two weeks after the release of a hotly-anticipated new gadget before you buy yours.
10. For the analytics junkie: To check your site stats only when you have a specific question, with actionable implications, in mind before you look at your latest numbers.
11. For the not-quite-a-coder geek: To write your first script, snippet or app.
12. For the developer: To invest 10% of the time you spend writing code in documenting the code you have written.
13. For the email forwarder: To stop forwarding email chain letters, cute cat pictures, funny jokes someone sent you, tragic stories about chronically ill children, consumer alerts about reportedly dangerous products, unbelievable true life stories that are unbelievable because they aren’t actually true, calls to action for social or political causes you aren’t directly involved in, or basically, any other email you want to forward but haven’t personally written. Believe me when I say that everybody who is making any of the other resolutions is begging you to make this one.

Whatever tech resolutions you make for the coming year, I hope it is one in which your online life is meaningful, fulfilling and integrated with an offline life that is every bit as rewarding.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online