Dinah Sanders is a post-boomer/pre-digital native who spends as much time online as off. Currently self-employed as an author and coach, 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, recently with active Discardia communities in Facebook, Twitter and Discardia.com, and most completely with her book, Discardia: More Life, Less Stuff.
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.