Friday Grab Bag

Happy Friday, dear readers. I hope your week has gone well and that you have an enjoyable weekend planned. I have the usual assortment of goodies, tips, and tools for today’s post. So let’s get into how to shrink people who overtweet, recover some of our time, and of course watch a fun video.

I love Twitter. It’s one of the few social media tools that I find incredibly useful for my teaching, my personal life, and my professional life. However, if there’s one thing that I find annoying is the overtweeting by some people. Luckily there’s a tool to help you figure out who’s overtweeting and do something about it. If this is an annoyance to you, too, check out Lifehacker’s article on the tool, shuu.sh.

If you find, however, that you are spending too much time on Twitter or something else that is robbing you of your productive work time, you might want to check out Lifehacker’s article on Reclaim your time using RescueTime. I think it is rather telling that I had to bookmark this article to come back to read because I was too busy at the time to stop for 5 minutes and read it. Perhaps I need to rescue some of my time too.

As the school year has now started on most campuses and schools (and is in full swing on semester campuses), I thought this article from CNN is a valuable read: what teachers really want to tell parents. Teachers, at all levels, have incredibly difficult (but usually rewarding) work. We need to support our teachers so we can all learn and improve the system.

Speaking of improvement, or rather instructions for improvement, check out Life’s Instructions. I love lists and this is a great one. Read it and then give someone a hug. It will make you both feel better.

And for those of you who have time to spare, and/or are looking into getting into consulting, check out The Instant Consultant post over The Art of Non-Conformity blog. It’s a nice, simple overview of the process of becoming a consultant.

Finally, while you are being super-productive, don’t forget to take a break and stretch. Perhaps meditate on this lovely image from beautiful portals.

Whimsical Rain Drop Cottage

Whimsical Rain Drop Cottage

And when you need to smile and laugh, check out the wonderful Simon’s Cat video below:

Have a lovely rest of your day and a great weekend full of relaxation and rejuvenation. I’ll be back next week. Allons-y!