Small businesses, start-ups and charities can book in for one-to-one mentoring sessions with Digital Garage technicians who will help improve their website, their social media presence, the way they use Adwords and much, much more.

The two training seminars are:

• Tell your story online – creating a good website, making it mobile-friendly, using insights gained from data to improve your site and using social media to boost your digital presence
• Reach new customers online – understanding how search works, being more findable in both regular (organic) and paid search

It’s all free, but it won’t be there for ever.   The Garage will pop up for a few months in the Library of Birmingham and then pop up in another city, so get your Google goodies while you can.

• Register for Free Training at the Birmingham Garage

Google launched its Digital Garage in our beautiful library today.  It’s aim is to help small businesses in Birmingham grow through their use of the web.

So if you fancy a one-to-one session with a Google “technician”, you can step into a pod and have a chat about your digital issue .

And you can go to a seminar to hear advice from a Google guru on telling your story digitally or reaching more customers online.

And it’s all free.

What’s not to like? At the launch there were jellybeans and lollipops too.

• Book a one-to-one session
• Book a place on a training seminar

It was six years ago the Chartered Management Institute produced a report  Management Futures – The World in 2018 which claimed that rather than balancing work and home demands, by 2018 we will be weaving the two together.

More recently Mashable has been asking if work-life integration is the new norm and Harvard Business Review has considered what successful work-life integration looks like.

Work-life integration

To me work-life integration looks like doing my supermarket shopping in five minutes while waiting for a meeting at work to begin. It’s picking up an email from the office while standing in the school playground. It’s saying to a colleague: “Let me share this document with you so you can work on it tomorrow at home.”

It means the boundaries between my paid work and the rest of my life are less rigid than they were before Google was a map, a calendar, a filing system, a note book and an address book as well as a store, a video channel and a search engine.

Where I once restricted work to work, I can now nip into work while watching telly, lounging by a hotel pool or crawling through a tunnel in a soft play centre.

Do I want my work and life to be integrated?

I CAN do these things.  But is it a good thing to do?  Do I want to? For me the answer is about the extent to which the integration is within my control.

For the most part Google and its suite of tools have greatly enhanced my life.  Being able to glance at work emails when I’m not in the office makes working part-time considerably easier. I don’t have to respond to emails if I don’t want to, but I can pick up on important things, if do.

And because I am only ever a click away, I can leave the office to see my son star as Joseph in his school nativity play or care for him when he is ill.  It’s a win-win situation.  Everyone gains.

Google calendar makes it possible

Apart from the capability of picking up emails anywhere, the tool I find most useful in leading an integrated life is Google calendar.

I remember the days, not so long ago, when, if I was trying to organise a get-together with a friend, she had to go home to look at her calendar before we could arrange anything.  She and her husband kept a calendar in their kitchen, so they could see what the other was doing. This was fine – unless she was at work, in the pub or anywhere else when she needed to make an arrangement. How she needed Google calendar!

I now have a Google calendar for home and one for work. I have one for my husband and one for my son and I can access the calendars of whoever gives me permission in the office.

This functionality is invaluable to anyone who aspires to lead an integrated life. If I need to arrange a doctor’s appointment, I can click into my work calendar, my home calendar and my son’s to find a space when all are free. And I can do this wherever I am – from my phone, from the office or from my desk top computer at home.

I can turn the calendars off

But the real beauty of Google calendar is that I can turn the calendars off.  I don’t share my home calendar with anyone outside the family. And when I’m at home or on holiday, I can tag a box which means my work calendar is not longer in my view.

Sometimes I need to see my personal and professional arrangements together. Sometime I want to separate the two.  The beauty of Google calendar is that I can integrate or not, depending on what my needs are at the time.

Google calendar is not just a tool for work-life integration.  It’s a metaphor for it too.

I came across that quote while I was taking a look at the new website of  St Saviour’s, Bridge of Allan where my brother is rector.

It just happened to catch my eye because I was about to write a post on why I was finding it hard to post at the moment.

Why it’s sometimes hard to write a blog post

There are many times in life when I find my inner world more vivid and enticing than the outer world: I can’t read on the bus because I want to stare out of the window, I’m late for an appointment because I have been day-dreaming in the bath, I don’t switch the telly on because lying on my back looking at the ceiling is far more entertaining than anything being offered to me on a screen.

I’m going through a time like this at the moment – a time when I am being beckoned by my soul rather than wooed through the web. The outer world is small and thin. My inner world is rich and deep.

I don’t know if this is “spirituality.”  I don’t know if this is the way of being to which Richard Rohr was alluding. But it is good to name this place and it a good place to be.

That’s it, I’ve said it.

I was leading a workshop for Birmingham Book Festival last weekend called Finding Your Blogging Voice. One of the first things we did was brainstorm our reasons for blogging. Between us we said:

• to have a voice
• to showcase work
• to create an archive of material
• to explain a business
• to connect with people
• to improve SEO.

I was leading the workshop and so I forgot to say that, though I do indeed get all those benefits from blogging, my number one reason for going tap, tap, tap is because I enjoy it.

There are all sorts of different pleasures, of course.

Blogging isn’t like sex

The pleasure of blogging isn’t like that of sex or swimming or lying on the sofa with a glass of wine. It’s  more like the pleasure of making a photo album – but using word-pictures rather than images.

And, as I said when I created this website, it’s like the pleasure of having my own room and getting it just how I want – my own little bit of cyberpace where I can play and muse and hang out with my friends.

In her seminal post What We’re Doing When We Blog, Meg Hourian talks about the anatomy of a post and the communication evolution etc.  It’s all good stuff.

But she doesn’t say: “Having fun.”  That’s what I’m doing when I blog and the day it stops being enjoyable, is the day I’ll stop blogging.

(I also had an ankle injury and had to take my child out of nursery but that’s not the point of this post. The point is to find a way of smiling like a Buddhist cat amidst that particular frustration that could not have existed before the internet was invented.)

This is what I said to myself:

1) Don’t take it personally

Some of us (mainly women?) see a techy failure as evidence that we are stupid cows, which is the biggest block to finding a solution that there is. You are not stupid. You are a smart person trying to figure it out. That’s all.

2) Take baby steps

We could spend the rest of our lives learning about computers, servers, hosts, SEO, POP3 and HTML code and we still wouldn’t know everything there is to know. Feeling overwhelmed is another block in learning. Don’t try to learn everything or even a lot. Take baby steps. Take one a day. You’ll be canny before you know it.

3) Remember you are not alone

Mentally identify the people who can help you. There are probably more than you think. Share yourself between them, so you aren’t asking the same person all the time. It often helps to type your question into Google and see what comes up  – though you don’t want to know that when NOT BEING ABLE TO GET ON THE NET IS WHAT YOU DARN WELL CAN’T DO IN THE FIRST PLACE.

4) See this as an opportunity to learn

When something gets sorted out, make sure you understand what went wrong. Then you can congratulate yourself on having taken five baby steps before you even got to the end of the week.

5) Question why we expect it to be effort-free

If we see a beautiful garden, we appreciate people have spent years on their knees, breaking their backs and washing the soil from their fingernails. If folks are using technology in a nifty way, we just assume they’re clever geeks rather than imagine the thought, the times they were foxed and the hours spent watching little green bars move across a computer screen.

6) Enjoy the change of rhythm

There comes a point, when you are ill, when you have to abandon your plans for the day and accept you can’t do anything so you may as well enjoy spending time with your duvet. View technological failures in the same way. Accept you as can’t be as productive as you had planned so find something else to enjoy in the hiatus.

And with that wise advice to myself I wafted through my week on a jasmine-scented cloud….. That woman who lost it while on the phone to Virgin Media. It wasn’t me. Oh no.

My last day at the Birmingham Post was Tuesday 22 December 2009. I slid out on a farewell blog like Santa on his sleigh. Here is my heart-felt post, with added pictures, which was published in the Birmingham Post that day.

Bye bye Birmingham Post

Bye bye Birmingham Post. I have been with you for more than 21 years. In those years you have been through eight editors, gone from being a broadsheet, to a tabloid, to a broadsheet and back to a tabloid again, only we don’t call you that. You were black and white then, you’re colour now. You were a six day a week publication when I joined. Now you are a multi-media operation of which the newspaper is only a part.

In those 21 years, I have changed too. My mother has died, I’ve been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, I’ve lived in community, I’ve lived on my own and I’ve lived with my family. I’ve married, I’ve had a son, I’ve had two books published and I’ve learnt to sing jazz. I’ve gone from being an angry idealist determined to change the world to someone who is content to change her little bit of it and is happier than I knew was possible – same hairstyle though.

Farewell everyone I have ever interviewed

Farewell everyone I have ever interviewed. I became a journalist because of you. It’s been an honour to hear your stories and to tell them as faithfully as I could, whatever the pressure of my deadlines or the barking of the newsdesk. There are some of you who have touched me so deeply, I will never forget you. Thank you for your trust and for making my work such a privilege.

I have just volunteered to leave a newspaper I love and a job about which I am passionate.

Last week Trinity Mirror, the company that owns the Birmingham Post, announced 41 journalists in the Midlands are to lose their jobs by the end of the year. I am offering to leave as part of the cull.

Why?