Community Contribution #4

Thinking traps

As a PLN can be a very large circle, it would mean that there is a lot of things to be aware of. As I do not feel secure when I just meet people online, I often would be trapped in thinking about what would be the next step because as it is hard to understand someone’s inner personality online, I would need to be very careful on what to do for each step.

The decisions on what I do in the PLN would be if I was to collaborate with someone in my network, I would select the tasks that I am most capable at, while the other party would do the task they would be most capable at because if we are in a tight deadline, we would want to get it done at the same time, but if it is a task that me and my working partner does not know, we would collaborate and find ways to get it done together.

According to Anxiety Canada, some people only look at situations in terms of extremes. For example, if something is done wrong, my co-worker would see it as “all bad” which does not allow a more moderate approach, and this I would see as an unhealthy collaboration because even there is room for improvement, I wouldn’t be allowed to do anything else, and I think this is very common in high-pressure environments because as tasks are needed to be done quick with quality, there are no room for mistakes. I think that finding a suitable career path would be a good solution because if you know what you would like to do early on, you would be able to have a plan B, C or D etc. in the event if you would like to have a better job or workplace environment.

One thing that would work out to adapt in workspaces is to improve web writing. According to Jakob Nielsen blog, using the example given by him and improving your web writing not only helps convenience and quality, but it also helps you to practice how to professionally write in a workplace setting.

Overall, I think that having a PLN is not as casual, but a collaboration that you don’t have the power to choose who to work with, but to have self-improvement to overcome the hurdles when working within the PLN circle.