Know how to use an iterative, incremental framework to create improvements in software? You can use those mad skillz to make your life more awesome too! Come learn and share how agile techniques can be used to achieve personal goals and lower your stress – and even to get the most out of SXSW. Walk away with immediate, practical, positive actions you can take. Ideas to discuss: • What day-to-day or minute-to-minute techniques will allow me to satisfy shorter-term goals while building up to bigger progress? • How can I exploit my little monkey brain to get it to actually do stuff that will make my life better? • How can I stay aligned to the big picture while working on today's challenges? Tags: productivity, agile, lifehacks, happiness, self-development
Dinah Sanders is a post-boomer/pre-digital native who spends as much time online as off. Currently self-employed as a productivity coach and writer, she has previously worked in jobs ranging from library page to senior software product manager. When her work hasn’t centered on organization and effective flow, it has been anchored around the reading life, whether on the printed page or a glowing computer screen. A constant theme throughout her work has been streamlining processes to help achieve goals better, faster, and with more enjoyment along the way; in other words, increasing awesomeness. She created the holiday Discardia in 2002 and has been writing about its principles ever since, intensively with a Discardian tip a day during 2006, currently with active Discardia communities in Facebook and Twitter and a revived Discardia.com.
In 1991 she was co-creator of Strafe’s Guide to Streetspeak and helped bring it to the web in 1997, making it if not the first cyberpunk slang dictionary, the first one online. She is a founding member of the blogging community, having launched her personal site, MetaGrrrl.com, in 1998 and acted as midwife to the word ‘blog’ in 1999 when she worked with the founders of Blogger.com. She is a member of the advisory board for South By Southwest Interactive and has been a technology advisor and an adjunct professor for San Jose State University’s School of Library and Information Science.
A degreed librarian, she has always had one foot in the physical world and one in cyberspace, as comfortable presenting to a room of 500 as instant messaging one-on-one. She has helped libraries give their online presence focused clarity and coached individuals to improve their personal and professional lives. In addition to helping others fine-tune their habits and possessions to better support the life they want to be living, she is in her ninth year of practicing Discardia in her own life.
Along with her keen interest in helping to define the next century of the movement born out of voluntary simplicity, uncluttering, and self-help, she writes at varying lengths – from books to tweets – about technology, productivity, and classic cocktails and is currently working on her first novel.
I am an executive coach who works with tech startup founders and teams. My work is grounded in my experience in the trenches as a technical co-founder. I help leadership teams to intentionally create the company culture that will allow founders, employees, and others in the company’s ecosystem to flourish and be happy. With individuals, I focus on identifying and transforming the toughest issues that founders face – the things that challenge them repeatedly in their business and their lives. By creating behavioral experiments that run in weekly cycles, I help people test their beliefs about the world, and achieve more effective and satisfying results with less effort and stress.
Prior to becoming a coach, I was a co-founder with two successful exits. The most recent was Critical Path (“we handle the world’s email!”) where we created cloud-based email hosting in 1997, prior to the advent of cloud computing. I built the tech team that led to IPO (Nasdaq: CPTH). Forbes named CPTH the fastest-growing high-tech company in the world in 1999. I'm honored to help the next generation of super-creative, awesome company founders learn and grow, and to contribute to the body of knowledge about how to create more successful and happy startups.
