I’ve finished putting photos over on Flickr from Ireland, now I just have to get all the way through the Scotland portion of the trip. I did decide to break it into different sets, so you don’t have to feel obligated to go through all of them at once, just click the one’s you’re most interested in and go.

I will say, however, that the Belfast set, especially, has quite a few comments about the history and future of Belfast in the descriptions that will hopefully help you understand what I think of when I look back at them. Belfast really was an interesting day trip for me. Photographically, it may not have been the most creative day I’ve ever spent, but it maybe made the most impact on me. It was either that or Kilmainham Goal. They are both so tied to the history I know of Ireland, that I felt very similar after touring both, as if I needed to simply sit and digest what I had just seen. I hope the photos convey just a little bit of that.

The whole collection can be seen on Flickr.

Seems like just a few days ago that I was in front of a room, in Vegas, telling people about the importance of using rules, and any other sort of filtering mechanism, to get stuff out of your inbox so that the high-priority items are more easily located.

Imagine my surprise when I saw that Google is trying to automate that task in Gmail by identifying your “priority” items.

I will be really interested to see how well this works. The biggest hurdle to anyone getting a better grip on email productivity, in my opinion, is that thinking about rules, coming up with a strategy, implementing rules, and tweaking as time goes on, is work. It takes some time and effort invested to tame the inbox in order to help ourselves get to higher priority items quicker. If Google can automate that to some degree, it will go a long way toward that goal. We shall see, but I’m looking forward to having a priority inbox for my Gmail account. I’m sure I’ll have more to say once I’ve seen it in action.

As I waited at the airport in Las Vegas yesterday, I did some quick figuring about the month of August, 2010. In the first 27 days of the month, I had spent the night in a hotel for 21 of them. In that time I had:

Slept in 5 different hotels

Flown over 10,000 miles

Been in 7 different airports

Taken two train trips to another city

Been in 3 different countries

Traveled across 8 time zones

Traveled in planes, trains, and automobiles, as well as public buses, private coaches, boats, taxi’s and a tram.

It’s been an amazing month. Adventurous, exciting, challenging, and yet so rewarding. It’s been somewhat exhausting, but I would do it all again in a heartbeat. The experiences I had in Ireland and Scotland were amazing. I saw history, beauty, and culture that was better than I had hoped. I met, conversed, and even drank, with fascinating and fun people, from all over the world. Then, the month was topped off with all the great people I talked to, learned from, and had a great time experiencing the conference in Las Vegas this past week. (And yes, I may have drank with some of them as well, that’s for sure.)

Sure, I’m ready to be home, and get back into a regular routine for awhile but I will never forget August of 2010. The experiences and memories of these last few weeks will stay with me for the rest of my life, and in the end, I couldn’t ask for anything more.

Jeff Brandt asked on Twitter at the end of the conference if the educational sessions or the networking opportunities were more valuable from the conference. I my 140 characters on Twitter I replied that I thought the networking was more valuable, but the firm wanted to see the quality sessions for the money spent. I wanted to take a minute and explain that in more detail.

Obviously, the organization paying to send you to ILTA, or any conference, is going to be looking for those quality educational sessions, and what information you bring back from those sessions that add value to them. That’s expected, and ILTA provides plenty of great sessions. I know I’m bringing back some ideas I will be implementing from the sessions I attended, and think they will provide great benefit to the firm.

At the same time, though. I am also bringing back lots of little tips and ideas that I picked up outside of the educational sessions, from conversations I had with folks, sometimes well into the morning hours. While those tips I picked up informally might not quite equal the value of the formal educational sessions, those conversations do something that the sessions could never do, they formed connections, or enhanced existing connections, that I will take with me going forward. These are folks who I will continue conversing with, even if it is just online, sharing information, ideas, tips, stories, etc. The educational sessions, good as they were, are done. The relationships are not.

I know that some of the folks I met for the very first time this past week, I will continue to be in touch with, and continue to gain knowledge from being connected with them. That’s a value that may be hard to put a dollar amount on, but it’s much higher than any one week’s worth of sessions could hope to be.

I’m looking forward to continuing the conversations.

Just wanted to toss out some links to some more stuff from ILTA this week. I will have another post with some thoughts about the benefits of the conference, but for right now, I have a couple of things I wanted to get out to folks.

First of all, if you attended our ILTAU session on Weds. morning, and were as disappointed as I was that there was some Outlook configuration issues that prevented us from really digging in to that PST by creating rules to filter things out of the inbox, I did go back to the documentation site that Sean Brady started for the session, and add some documentation on using Rules, and the Organize function in Outlook 2007. Check it out, or if you weren’t able to make it, check it out for some information on what we talked about.

Secondly, I had the pleasure of doing a quick interview with Josh Gilliland, of the Bow Tie Law Blog, about Social Networking benefits, and the e-discovery issues with social media. It was great to finally get to meet Josh after many years of “knowing” each other online, and the having some discussion was fun, and a good example of exactly the sort of benefits you get from the conversation at ILTA, above and beyond the educational sessions.

Lastly, for those I met at ILTA (and there were more people than I could possibly name!), or those who I didn’t get a chance to see in person but have connected with online, I wanted to share the places where you can connect with me, beyond the blog.

LinkedIn – http://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemac29

Twitter – http://twitter.com/mikemac29

Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/mikemac29

But, enough about me.

The session was right after lunch, and was sparsely attended, to say the least, but I think it went pretty well. At least a couple of folks seemed to get something out of it, so there’s that.

I wanted to share a little bit of the idea for my section of the discussion. I drew inspiration from the quote “I’m a name, not a number” that was in the description, choosing to focus on the individual, instead of the overall organizational culture, because I firmly believe that it doesn’t really matter what your organization does, you owe it to yourself to grow your career. So, I answered the “I’m a name, not a number”, complaint with a simple statement. “So act like it.” Learn how to build relationships and trust, learn how to effectively communicate, and continually educate yourself on your business, clients, and the industry as a whole.

In this economy, you either prove you bring value to the organization, or you risk being replaced. It’s that simple. If you continue to grow, learn new skills, and bring new ideas to the table, you’re going to appear much more valuable than the folks we have to ask what they do around here. My one line takeaway from the session was this:

Your Career = Your Responsibility.

Don’t wait for the firm to decide what skills you need, that will always be reactionary, and based on their needs. Go out, connect with others in your field, and see the skills that will serve you well in the future. Take the initiative to grow, that is a skill that will serve you well in and of itself.

Well, technically Sunday was day one, but Monday was day one of the educational sessions, so I’m calling it day one.

Jason Jennings got things going, with a great keynote where he discussed the “5 Secrets to Put Strategic Unity on the Fast Track”. Among the many good points made by Jason, one of the things that really caught my attention was his description of the shared traits of the leaders of the best companies in the world, and how those traits affect the rest of an organization. For example, these leaders were happy to share their plans, their knowledge, and their strategy. They wanted everyone in their organization, and everyone they did business with, to understand the purpose of their work, and their place within the overall purpose. Given that, I couldn’t help but wonder if those of us who are practicing this whole idea of sharing and learning from one another in the online world, are in fact, practicing leadership?

We are, after all, on the forefront of sharing ideas and knowledge openly. We’re open to new ideas, and also open to letting go of old ideas as we acquire more knowledge. We’re accountable to the folks we share with, they’ll know if we start passing off bad information, or straying from the truth, and they will call us out on it. I also like to think that those of us living in this space, who really want it to benefit our careers, are also good stewards, both of the information we have and share, and also of the attention and time spent by those who follow us.

Social Networking as part of leadership training? Maybe, it’s worth thinking about anyway.

The rest of the day for me was spent in the Litigation Support track, and the one thing that really jumped out at me in those sessions, and also from a breakfast discussion at a Cowen Group event this morning, was the things that need to be in place before we can even think about implementing project management disciplines. Simply put, legal project management depends on measurements and workflow processes. You have to define the processes and document the work well before you can think about what to measure, and how it fits into a project management process. Same thing goes for making technology and strategy decisions, you have to understand how you work, what work you do, and what your end result looks like before you can make the correct decisions. It’s an idea I’ve been working on quite a bit, and one I’m determined really takes quite a bit of time. Others are further along this process, but it takes work, and it takes buy-in from management, which can only come from having good measurements to show the value. So we measure and document and try to spot the trends and the patterns that will inform us of the best way to plan for the future.

Good data can only help, right?

As always though, above and beyond all of the educational sessions, having the chance to catch up with old contacts, meet some online friends in person, and make new connections is the biggest benefit to being here. Again, it’s that network of folks who are willing to share what they know that is the best resource we walk away from at the end of the week. I look forward to building it even more!

As I’ve mentioned here before, I’ll be one of the presenters in the ILTAU session about Personal Knowledge Management, on Weds. Aug 25 at 9:00AM. In preparation for that, I wanted to throw an idea against the wall here, and see what folks thought.

I actually decided to start our session (actually it’s two sessions, a two-parter if you will) with a hands-on demonstration with Outlook. The reason I’m starting there, is that I believe that people who struggle with managing their email, and don’t understand how to use things like rules to filter out the low-priority items, are going to struggle the same exact way when it comes to using other KM tools. If you don’t understand the how’s and why’s of filtering when it comes to your email, how can we ask you to suddenly grasp those same ideas when you move to things like RSS readers, Twitter, Social Bookmarking, etc?

I find that the biggest reason people give me for either not using those tools, or having given them up once they’ve tried them, is the inability to locate good sources, and then filter them appropriately. RSS feeds, or anything other source, just becomes another pile of information that they don’t have time to look at. There’s no sense of how to filter and prioritize what they are getting.

Typically, I find that these same people have had the same exact struggle with email for years, with no end in sight. Thus, my thought is “Let’s start there.” Let’s dig into where most people in law firms live, in Outlook, and try to help them get an understanding that there is a better way than simply slogging through 100′s of messages in the order they came in. Let’s get them to look at it in other ways, and help get them out from the email pile. Then we can talk about all the other great tools that are out there.

So long as people are looking at the incoming email stream as a one or two-dimensional flow, to be passively consumed and dealt with as it comes in, they will be forever limited when it comes to truly being able to filter, sort, and make sense of the information they are getting. If we can change their view of the one tool that they all use every single day, then we can begin to open up the greater world of social learning and knowledge management to them. We can take that stream of “receive, read, act and reply”, and turn it into a three-dimensional strategy to help prioritize, make sense of, and apply what we are seeing to our own lives.

If we can accomplish that, we will have done something! We’ll see how it goes!

If you’re going to be at ILTA, be sure to look me up and say hello!

I spotted this on a post from Advocate’s Studio about Siftlinks, and thought it was worth a shot to replace the now-dropped ReadTwit. I just got started with it, and my impression is that it’s better than nothing, really. It doesn’t go through and grab the post from the link within the tweet, but it does at least show me the links. That’s something, at least. Hopefully, they will make some improvements including grabbing the full article being linked to, and give me some filtering options.

I guess, for now, my filtering options are to stop following people who post useless links, right?

Obviously, I was having too much fun exploring Ireland and Scotland to spend much time updating anything around here the last couple of weeks. I took over 1500 photos and plan to maybe upload a selection of them to Flickr in small batches, as I have time to work on them. With ILTA10 right around the corner, I wouldn’t expect many of them to get up there all that soon if I were you, though.

One thing that was quite the challenge for me in Ireland was the constantly changing weather, and lighting environments, as I wandered around. For photographers, lighting is sort of important, yet in Ireland I ran into situations where I was shooting in sunlight, and suddenly, it wasn’t sunny. For example, one late afternoon after returning from a tour I was walking towards the River Liffey and realized that the late-afternoon sun would make for some really nice shots. However, by the time I walked 3 blocks and got myself situated along the river, it was raining. Fifteen minutes later, it had stopped raining, but had become rather windy and overcast. So I headed back up O’Connell Street, only to have that late afternoon come back for a bit, only I was now shooting elsewhere, and I decided to stay where I was rather than run the risk of heading back to the river only to have the sunlight disappear again.

So, many of my pics from Ireland will need some post-processing work to adjust for the varying light situations. Meanwhile, we spent a week in Scotland and had one half-day of rainy and cloudy weather, with the rest being beautiful sunny days. That’s ridiculously rare, as many of the locals we talked to wanted us to move there in order to keep the weather luck we had! That helped make my photography a bit easier!

Still, the trip was wonderful, and I have so many memories tied to these photos that I will cherish them for years to come. I hope to be able to share some of the stories and history of both Ireland and Scotland along with the photos. Hope you enjoy them, when I get around to putting them up!