Sept 13-14, 1814. On the night of Sept 13, Francis Scott Key was aboard a ship that was delayed in Baltimore harbor by the British attack there on Fort McHenry. Key had no choice but to anxiously watch the battle. That experience and seeing the American flag still flying over the fort the next morning inspired him to pen the verses that, coupled with the tune of a popular drinking song, became our official national anthem in 1931, 117 years after the words were written.

Source: Chases’ Calendar of Events 2011

by Steve Lee, APR

She stood in front of me, tears streaming down her face, shaking and sobbing. “I just want to go home. I just want to be home.”

At 19, in college, a long way away from home for the first time and facing finals week. The pressure is intense. So much so that even the strongest students show strain from missed sleep and stress.

All I wanted to do was hug her and tell her that it would be OK and that she would come through this and be alright and that she would be back home again very soon. I almost did, but instead I kept a respectful distance, looked her in the eyes and spoke reassuring words as softly as I could. It would have been so much more human, so much warmer and probably more effective if I could just hold her hand. But not in today’s world, and that’s just sad.

I’m 59 years old and she was 19, two years younger than my youngest child and six years younger than my own daughter. Impropriety would never enter my mind, ever, just the need to comfort someone who was clearly hurting.

Throughout my personal and professional lives, I have never shied away from touching another person, male or female, young or old when they appeared in need. It is not a big deal, and means little more than a human connection. It’s what we do in our family, at our church and with our friends.

When I coached baseball, I was always cautious about how we touched our young players, even when showing them techniques for fielding, batting and throwing. But if a boy needed a hug, it was always there and we were very public and open. As the boys grew, those hugs remained until today it’s a casual part of our greeting.

Now, in my second professional life as a professor at Southern Methodist University, I feel uncertain and unsure. I spent the first semester of teaching observing many things, including the lack of public human contact. Oh I saw students touching students and other professors, but it seemed reserved for those who had known each other for years and built a trust and understanding. I’m new and spent only months with my students before we had to part for the summer break.

Stress and pressure are simply a part of life. Just like I described above with students, I’ve seen the same powerful distress occur with professionals, young and old, novice and seasoned, male and female. After 37 years in business, I’ve come close to that point myself more than a few times. Life can sometimes be hard and it shows up in the workplace when the pressure mounts.

If someone in our office came to me in obvious pain, and it has happened, I would not hesitate to reach out and hug my associate, my client or my friend. The gesture of open arms is automatic and meant to convey comfort and empathy. But you have to be clear about your own feelings, and very aware of how the other person reacts to the advance. If a person shies away or recoils, I’ll take a step back and connect with the eyes instead.

I’ve been through sexual harassment training for my coaching and in order to be near high school athletic groups. Mechanically, I know where not to touch and what signs to watch for telling me the touch is not wanted. Regardless of the dos and don’ts, whether touching is acceptable or not usually lives in the environment — the office, the classroom, the field. If the group casually touches one another then one or more will usually include the coach or teacher in this casual human connection.

At school, no one said I couldn’t touch a student, or that a student couldn’t touch me. Yet, I fear that even a simple touch may seem imposing or send the wrong message. For me it’s a cold stalemate and feels rather awkward but the dictates of the environment or the group outweighs my own way of being.

Research studies have repeatedly proven that the simple act of touching another person will result in physical benefits including slowing the heart rate, reducing blood pressure and speeding recovery from illness. Even casual online research discovered a number of stories about the power of touch and most come to the same conclusion — even the simplest touch can be soothing, calming, and healthy.

In an article for the DailyGood (Hands On Research: The Science of Touch, by Dacher Keltner](http://www.dailygood.org/view.php?sid=9), Executive Editor Dacher Keltner talks about hands as “the primary language of compassion.” Then adds, “touch is truly fundamental to human communicaiton, bonding, and health.” Even the most mundane pat on the back, handshake or touch on the arm communicates from one person to another.

ABC’s Diane Sawyer in a piece for The Conversation pointed out a study where 70% of strangers could communicate emotion with one another through nothing more than a touch. The same study also found that touch is a powerful way to communicate emotion.

In the New York Times article, “Evidence That Little Touches Do Mean So Much,” (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/23/health/23mind.html) Benedict Carey writes, “Touching eases pain, lessens anxiety, softens the blows of life, generates hope and has the power to heal. In fact, modern psychology and medicine are confirming what mothers across the centuries have untuitively known–namely, the healing power of touch.”

“People who are more comfortable with touch are less afraid and less suspicious of other people’s motives and intentions,” says Stephen Thayer, professor of psychology at the City University of New York. “They tend to have less anxiety and tension in their everyday lives.”

Going one step farther, Victor M. Parachin in a blog titled “The healing power of touch,” tells of the near miracle results touch has on patients. Parachin goes on to offer these tips “kiss your spouse when leaving for work, embrace your friends when greeting them, hug your children when they return from school and hold hands with your significant other when you are watching television.”

So why am I covering this topic? In a “connected” world, where the connection is more digital than human, I don’t want us to lose the importance of simple touches – the hand, the arm, a hug – when a person is in need. One touch can soothe, comfort and communicate genuine caring in a way words never can. Yet it also requires careful discretion. Touch softly but only if the other person appears comforted. Any other reaction is probably a sign that your touch is intrusive and distressful.

May all the good news you hear be true.
steve

I have this problem.

First, there isn’t enough time in the day to see, touch, handle and complete all the things I want.

Second, after handling what I can, there isn’t near enough time to explore and learn about all the new things in the world that I feel I need to know, much less master.

Finally, all my digital tools buzz, ping, pop, ring and purr morning, noon and night. So I’m constantly chasing shiny new emails, news snippets, blog articles, instant messages, social media updates and tweets or some such.

I’ve tried turning things off, but breaking up is really hard to do. I don’t have the willpower to stop. Help!

Sound familiar?

Overwhelmed from all the news, information and communications coming at us from every conceivable direction is a very common complaint. The answer, unfortunately, is elusive.

Your Priorities Have Become My Priorities

Most of us have tried hiding things, pushing them aside (there’s an app for that) or simply turning them off just to have someone call or drop by our office to mildly complain that you haven’t replied to that urgent email message they sent 10 minutes ago. When did our world become immediate response and instant attention? When did your priorities instantly become my priorities? Well, when we turned on all those wonderful instant access tools and kept them on 20 hours a day. When we put a powerful business and personal tool in our pocket or purse and listened all day and night long just waiting for it to chirp. By using all the wonderful digital and mobile tools available to us and responding so quickly when touched, we set up the expectation that we will always respond immediately when pinged or buzzed or popped or whirred.

Once the expectation is set, turning off the tools so we can control what gets through just creates confusion and sometimes concern in the people with whom we most often communicate. Going AWOL, it seems, often generates enough concern that friends and associates hunt you down just to make sure you’re OK.

So, leaving all your digital tools turned on creates an unproductive level of distraction and turning them off creates another level of urgent communications asking you why you didn’t respond quickly to that urgent message. It’s a lose-lose situation.

Now let’s add another dimension to this dilemma — lost productivity. The degree of distraction costs your employer dearly. In a recent Mashable article, Soren Gordhamer quotes a harmon.ie survey saying that the average worker loses $10,375 each year being constantly sidetracked. So the problem is not just yours, but theirs as well.

Manage the Pops, Pings and Whirrs

Just like ringtones can be used on your phone to tell you who is calling, similar tones can be used on your computer to tell you who is emailing. For example, I define a certain sound for emails coming from my clients, a different sound for messages from QSI staff, students, family and close friends and no sound for the rest. I turn off all those bouncing icons, quick alerts and other distractions meant to alert me to an incoming message and depend solely on the sounds to tell me who’s emailing.

I clear my email first thing in the morning and last thing before I leave. And in between I listen for the sounds that tell me something important has happened.

One App to Rule Them All

Social media? Well, I squelch all the sounds and alerts and will myself not to look every few minutes. One great trick is to consolidate all my important social media into one place so I can quickly scan incoming Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin updates. Hootsuite is my tool for that job, and works well as long as I don’t keep it in front of my face for too long (shiny baubles, oh, oh, look!). I lose a little functionality, but not the gist of the social flow I follow.

Finally, I have an incoming ringtone for everyone important in my phone. They are not all unique, but anything outside of my standard ringtone means that the call is important. Everything else goes to voicemail. They’ll call back if it’s really that important.

My controls are not brain surgery, just common sense. But as the digital tools we use get smarter, more pervasive and intrusive, common sense may just be our best defense.

Until next time — may all the good news you read be true.

steve

The Apple iPad is quickly becoming the “go to” computer for millions of us. Converting from desktop or laptop computers wasn’t difficult — the iPad tablet is much smaller, lighter, quicker, has a very long battery life and with 3G is always connected. Slip it under your arm, and head out the door. Simple. Easy.

But (isn’t there always a “but?”), as convenient and cool as the tablet computer is, it still takes some adjustment.

No doubt, the iPad is a very cool device. You can do virtually everything you can do on a laptop. Edit MS Word files – check. Email – check. Spreadsheets – check. Web browsing – check. Music and videos – check. Read books and magazines – check. Write blogs – check. Read and manage social media – check. There isn’t much it can’t do straight out of the box, so what’s the problem?

Well, it’s not so much a problem as an adjustment. You see, the very things that makes the iPad appealing, its size, weight, and keyboard are the very things that feel “foreign” when you first start using it.

Living in a Desktop/Laptop World

We live in a desktop/laptop world. Desktop is simple — monitor, keyboard and mouse on a stable flat surface. Laptop is also pretty easy — keyboard and screen in a clamshell device large enough to sit comfortably on your lap. Then comes along the iPad.

In truth, the iPad is unwieldy to balance in one hand and type with the other. So that’s out if you want to do some real work. And it’s size and light weight means it sort of floats in your lap instead of anchoring securely. Finally, the onscreen keyboard is perfectly functional, but very uncomfortable for many.

These are not big obstacles, but if you want to use the iPad day in and day out, you have to get past these and make your tablet perfectly convenient and comfortable. The answer lies in cases and keyboards.

The Case is the [First] Key

The one essential iPad accessory is its case. There are literally hundreds of styles for you to choose. But, before you start shopping you will need answer one simple question — Exactly where will you use your iPad the most? Alright smartie, it’s easy to answer “in your lap,” but even that has variations. Will you sit in your office chair and work? Or will you sit in your easy chair or couch at home to check your email and social? And what about those mornings when you want to scan all the news while lying in bed? So the real answer to the “where will I use it most” questions is probably several places. So the case you choose must be flexible.

After trying several cases over the first year of using my iPad I settled on a leather-like case that let me prop the iPad up at different angles. The ZooGue ZGSMRT1 Tablet Case (http://l.qsig.com/zoogue) closes to completely cover and protect the iPad when not in use and uses an easel-back arrangement with strong velcro to let you open it to virtually any angle. Sitting straight upright in those all-too-familiar airport terminal chairs, the ZooGue case opens to a very wide angle, almost perfect for typing on the onscreen keyboard. When I’m reclining on a couch or in bed, the ZooGue secures the iPad screen more upright to accommodate the shallower angle.

If you shop the ZooGue and it’s just not right for you, then consider my second choice, the incase iPad Book Jacket (http://l.qsig.com/incase). Protects the iPad when closed, and lets you prop the tablet at various preset angles to accommodate most of your situations. Frankly, it was my favorite case for months before I saw the ZooGue.

Replacing the Glass Keyboard

Making the iPad comfortable in your lap aside, the complaint I hear most often centers on the iPad’s onscreen keyboard. It’s perfectly usable for entering short bits of information, but if you write or edit documents, the iPad’s glass keyboard can be a major source of frustration. The biggest problem seems to be the lack of tactile feedback when you press a key. Odd something seemingly so small can cause such discomfort, but it does. We are so conditioned to the feel of a certain kind of keyboard, that changing to something this different can be almost impossible.

The quick and obvious answer is to pair that great and flexible iPad case with one of many different external, bluetooth keyboards on the market today. These keyboards come in a wide range of sizes– some are tiny, much smaller than the onscreen keyboard. These little keyboards are made of a rubber–like material and literally roll up. Very convenient, but my fat fingers suffered trying to find the tiny little keys. So, no-go for me.

My answer was a full-size keyboard, like the folding Matias keyboard (http://l.qsig.com/matias). Full size, complete with a number key pad, the Matias is an almost perfect match to my desktop and laptop keyboards. It was great when I traveled. Just open it up, turn it on and get to work. The familiar arrow keys made onscreen navigation quicker and even more familiar. But while this option worked well, lugging around a large folding keyboard more than half the size of the iPad itself just didn’t work in the end.

So I turned to my old, trusty Apple wireless keyboard, a full-size keyboard sans number key pad. Thin and light, comfortable to use, packs well on trips. But (there’s that word again) it still meant lugging two separate items and then pulling out the external keyboard every time I wanted to work.

Case and Keyboard Together

Finally, after months of trial and error I decided to try out one of those fancy combo case and keyboard accessories. Most looked promising but each had inherent problems. Beware, while the photos look great, some of these combo cases sported a much too small keyboard — nice feel, but impossible to line up and get the right keys under my fingers. Then I tried the Kensington KeyFolio Bluetooth Keyboard Accessory Case (http://l.qsig.com/keyfolio). Looked good, felt good, until I realized that the right-side shift key was missing and that other characters required multiple strokes to execute. Awkward, and totally foreign to a writer that’s used to writing quickly and on the fly.

Then AppAdvice featured a new accessory called a clamcase (clamcase.com). Exciting possibilities. So I preordered and waited, and waited, and waited. Months later it arrived and it was well worth the wait.

The keyboard is built into the hard shell iPad case. Open it one way and you’re presented with a nice sized keyboard directly beneath the iPad screen. Open the ClamCase the other direction, and it holds the iPad at any angle from wide open to straight upright. Suitable for sitting in your lap or when you’re lying farther back. The iPad just snaps into the case. Snap, pair the bluetooth keyboard and you’re working.

The clamcase keyboard is as large as it can be and still fit in an iPad case. But the magic is that the keys feel full size and they are of the “chicklet” type that go up and down when you press them, so it feels just like a regular keyboard.

Within minutes I was zipping along typing like I’d been on this keyboard all my life. And with the wonderful little arrow keys, my fingers almost never leave the keyboard. For me it was the perfect combination of function and protection for the iPad. A, virtually built-in keyboard in a hard protective case. Pair it once and from them on you simply hold down a power key for a couple of seconds and the keyboard pairs. Perfect!

But, (there’s that word again) just a couple of caveats — the clamcase is a heavy case, so it adds some weight to your nice, slim iPad. And second, whomever engineered the slots for the earphone and dock cable plug-ins needs to actually test and use the product. None of the standard accessory cables easily fit, even Apple’s standard docking sync and charger cables. A shame because otherwise the clamcase is a great product.

So, whether you just need a flexible case or prefer a combo case/keyboard accessory, think before you buy and read as many reviews as you can. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a drawer full of nice cases that just didn’t win the race.

Until next time. May all the good news you read be true.

Cheers,
steve