Plan Your Dive, Dive Your Plan

Though I haven’t been in the ocean in a long time, I’m a diver. At one time in my life, I lived to dive. I worked at jobs I didn’t care much about and travelled all over the world so I could submerge myself in distant waters. In fact, I once spent a lot of time underwater with the guy who did the underwater Antarctica photography (and production) for the Discovery film Encounters at the End of World. (Trailer shown above; put that in your Netflix queue.) That’s a long story.

The reason I mention it is that’s it New Year’s Eve and that calls to mind a motto I learned from my first dive guru Lloyd Austin (who ran the UC Berkeley Underwater Research Program for many years) : “Plan your dive. Dive your plan.” The idea is simple: You decide how deep to go, how long to stay down, who your buddy is, and what your goals for the dive are before you hit the water. That’s your Dive Plan. You don’t deviate from that plan. It’s a safety thing.

But this is a motto that applies to more than diving, as did most of the Lloyd’s teachings. I pretty much apply it to every day: The first thing I do every morning is make a Day Plan. If I get to the end of a day and haven’t accomplished my plan, either I wasn’t a very good diver or it wasn’t a good plan. At the beginning of a new year, I also like to look at the big picture and plan the large brush strokes for the coming year. I like to take much of this day to apply the “Plan your dive. Dive your plan.” motto to everything I do. So I’m thinking now about what I want for this blog in 2009.

Like diving, blogging is something you can’t do alone. Writing a blog without you all commenting, emailing, and asking questions would simply not be worth doing. So I’m thinking of you as my dive buddies. And now it’s time to plan our dive. How deep shall we go? How long shall we stay? What are our goals?

I did an interview yesterday with the cute guy who writes Culture Crash and he asked me a question that got me thinking about what I want to do here. The interview isn’t up over there yet but here is the question and answer:

Cute Culture Crash Guy: If you could pick just three things readers would walk away with after reading your book, what would they be?

Me: The feeling that they will never need to put up with that annoying guy down the hall at work just to get their computers working. I’d like my readers to know there are other women who love technology for the same reasons they do –- or would, if it weren’t for all the guy talk — and to come hang out with us at GeekGirlfriends.com. I’d also like my reader to feel she could slap the next guy who implies she’s stupid about computers just because she doesn’t like to talk in acronyms.

So I know I want to make this a place where we can ask each other about technology, share our new discoveries, where I can share my connection to the companies that build high-tech companies — either through giveaways or by helping my readers get problems sorted out. (Sometimes you need an in!) I want to be a part of getting rid of the feeling that technology is guy stuff. And I want to help eliminate the feeling women often have of being “behind” when it comes to tech topics, which is so not true. What I don’t know is what my buddy (that’s you, following this dive plan analogy) wants to do. So?

What do you want to do while we are here in 2009?