OpenCoffee, Twitter and thinking out of the box
I went to the Limerick OpenCoffee Club this morning. I could afford this luxury, as the semester is over- no more teaching on Thursdays- and my contract ended anyhow.
We had quite a few of new attendees, and I tried to play the host. Don’t think I succeeded very well, because I was too nervous thinking of the 1000 different things I had to postpone doing for going there! But anyhow, after 10 min and 2 urgent mails sent, I managed to sink into the relaxed atmosphere…
This time we had two presentations on the agenda:
- Elaine Rogers from Seefin Coaching spoke about Time Management, and
- John Gleeson from the University of Limerick (UL) spoke about Technology Transfer.
I had my laptop with me, and instead of taking notes, I felt like twittering what was going on. Read from the bottom up if you want to make any sense of it!These are all the tweets under #LOCC during those hours!
The funny part was that Ger Hartnett read my tweet about Elaine’s slide with a list of time wasters, and asked if Twitter was on the list. I presented Elaine with the comment (in almost real time), and she confessed she avoided it on purpose… because herself spends a lot of time on Twitter.
- elainerogers @gabig58 @schregardus thanks 4 comments. Really enjoyed giving the talk 🙂#LOCC
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gabig58 #LOCC Partner with researchers and research groups, make your skill sets known to UL, suggest interesting problems, tap into EI support - gabig58 #LOCC The EI High-potential start-up program – http://short.ie/chd073
- gabig58 #LOCC Successful UL Campus Companies: http://www.powervation.com/, http://www.stokesbio.com/, http://www.crescentds.com/
- gabig58 omg! 5 new followers in the last 20 min, just because I’m tweeting from #LOCC! Thank you! Hope my battery won’t fail me!
- gabig58 #LOCC For companies looking for collaboration with universities,have a look at Innovation Vouchers and Innovation Partnerships(EI funded)
- gabig58 #LOCC John Gleeson’s role at UL is to facilitate university – industry linkages and research commercialisation
- gabig58 #LOCC A bit of history – the establishment of UL in 1972, a picture of the White House and one of the Living Bridge
- gabig58 #LOCC John Gleeson from UL talking about Technology Transfer for the next 20 min.
- gabig58 #LOCC @elainerogers Anecdote about a person changing her Facebook profile to check what ads would come up!
- gabig58 #LOCC @elainerogers Try to fit your todo’s in one of the four quadrants: important/not important, urgent/not urgent
- gabig58 #LOCC @elainerogers shares her personal planner layout. A wheel of life (http://short.ie/pft4kz) underneath helps her keep the balance.
- gabig58 #LOCC Are you a Fireman? Over-Committer? Acquarian? Chatty Kathy? Perfectionist? Find out yourself! http://short.ie/o7gbov
- gabig58 #LOCC if procrastination is taking up,and you spend your day on Twitter, FB,YouTube -your body is actually telling you it’s time for a break
- gabig58 #LOCC The mayonese jar story:you can put the golf balls in,the pebbles and the sand -but there’s always space left for a cuppa with a friend
- gabig58 #LOCC @ghartnett No trace of Twitter on @elainerogers time wasters list. She confessed she avoided it on purpose…she’s a Twitter addict;)
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ghartnett @gabig58 Is Twitter on the list? #LOCC - gabig58 #LOCC @elainerogers goes through a list of time wasters. Meetings very well represented;)
- ghartnett @gabig58 @elainerogers talk sounds interesting. Sorry I’m missing it. #LOCC
- gabig58 #LOCC @elainerogers from Seefin just started her talk. A few attendees’ opinions on time management. Elaine “time management is a myth”
And my battery did fail me in the end!
I had the chance to play an Akoha Thank you! card with Ted Vickey, for his talk on LinkedIn at Bizcamp.
And then I ran home to finish my slides for the Lero Industry Day on Monday.
In the evening, I went to an event organised by the Limerick County Enterprise Board: a talk by Brody Sweeney, the man behind O’Briens Sandwich Bars, titled “The real way to start up and stay in business”. The talk was the most inspiring event I went to lately! Brody spoke with extreme honesty about the problem he faced along the way, the sometimes unorthodox approaches he had to take, and what really counts. What really counts are people and hard work – and this struck a chord in me! We’ve heard the same thing from Patrick Collison at the OpenCoffee almost a year ago – there’s really hard work behind any successful business!
And the message we all took home was that there’s an opportunity in every apparently bad thing that’s happening to us – and the current recession is no exception! So I’ll try to get up smiling tomorrow morning, start with my best foot and see the hidden opportunities behind all this apparent doom and gloom everybody seems to be whining about!
May 07 2009 11:44 pm | Ireland and unconferences
James Corbett on 12 May 2009 at 9:12 pm #
I didn’t think you were nervous at all Gabriela, and thanks for stepping in to help organize. BTW, good to bump into you too at Brody’s talk and have to agree with all you say. Brody was on the panel who interviewed me last year for the Social Entrepreneurs Ireland network and he was as much a gentleman then as at the talk.