Back From Chicago…With A New Schedule

In spite of the rainy weather, I enjoyed my return to Chicago. I had not been back since 1999, where I spent a year getting my master's in journalism from Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism. That year Medill announced it would offer a "new media" concentration. They had no real curriculum in place yet and I was enrolled in their tried and true magazine publishing project. I switched concentrations in my last quarter and joined two other pioneering students to basically get our hands dirty learning how to build a site from nuts to bolts. Not only did we report and write articles for our sites, but we cropped in Photoshop, made graphics in Illustrator and built tables in Dreamweaver. It is now over seven years later.

So when I returned to Northwestern on Thursday to speak to students taking new media, it was really exciting to find a "full house." Ironically, it was the day of Medill's Career Fair, where all of the mainstream news organizations show up to recruit. This made it even more flattering that the classroom where I spoke was full. My post Medill life has been for from traditional or mainstream. I turned down my first post grad job offer at CNN (doing financial reporting for the website) and instead embarked on a wild ride catching the tail end of the dot com bubble, working for several start-ups, then AOL, then a couple more start-ups and ultimately launching this blog and building the Ypulse brand. I think my journey was a refreshing alternative to the traditional journalism career paths over at the Career Fair. And while I still don't know where it's taking me, no matter what happens with Ypulse, I can honestly say I'm glad I took the risk. For those of you who responded to this post a few weeks back, the update is that I am working on a partnership that will keep Ypulse going for at least the next six months. If the partnership is successful, we hope Ypulse will be around for much longer and that it will continue to expand.

And in the past six months, since I left Current TV, I have learned an important lesson, one that was reinforced by Ypulse reader and fellow author Michelle Goodman's excellent book: The Anti 9 to 5 Guide: Practical career advice for women who think outside the cube…Create a schedule. I have been waking up, making coffee and sitting down at the computer from 7 a.m. often until 3 p.m. without breaks or lunch, finally getting up when my dog just won't be ignored any longer (although he's pretty good at chilling out as you can see from this pic). And for all of this time being glued to the computer, I haven't been managing my time all that well. I get distracted by email, feeling like I have to answer every one immediately. So today is the first day of my new schedule. I woke up this morning and took my dog for a long walk, showered and got dressed, made coffee and a bowl of cereal and sat down to blog. I will only answer urgent email in the mornings and set aside a couple of hours in the late afternoon to respond to other email. I will break for lunch. Take another walk in the afternoon, and if possible, shut down at 7 p.m. It seems so obvious. So simple. But not having done this for the past six months, the stress, burnout and general malaise has been palpable.

And with that, I'll leave you with a handful of "me" links. The first is an interview I did for the Freelancer's Guide on About.com. Next up is audio of the "Under 18" panel I was on at SXSW (they finally got this podcast up - yay). Finally Robin Raskin, a fellow author/blogger wrote a nice post about Totally Wired over at Yahoo! Tech. Thanks Robin!

Just a quick reminder about my schedule this week and next: I will be traveling to Houston Thursday and Friday this week to speak to parents about Totally Wired and will be in Vegas Monday and Tuesday at The Cable Show where I will be moderating a "Totally Wired" teen panel.

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