I see reflective practice as an important part of not only our professional, but personal development. It provides an opportunity to review the experiences we have, learning from them and applying what we have learnt.

I really like this quote from the thing 5 post on the CPD23 blog. I had these two elements in mind when I was thinking about what I would write for this post. My personal and professional reflective practice takes on two quite different forms.

Waikawa Beach

You are currently reading the output of my personal reflective practice. For me blogging is the most effective and cathartic way of processing my thoughts on events I have attended, new technologies and other issues concerning the profession.

The reflective practice I do as part of my job is much more formal. It follows the plan, do, review process. I’d like to say it happens with everything I’m working on but to be realistic I only get the chance to reflect in this formal way when working on big projects. The example which springs to mind is library inductions. Following last year’s inductions I set about conducting a review of the provision in my team. I joined forces with a colleague who was reviewing the central library induction programme and we started planning changes for this year. At present we’re in the doing stage and I’m spending the majority of my time editing video content. Built in to the programme we have a review process which focuses on feedback from students who attend the induction sessions and staff who deliver them. With this information we can start the whole process again and set about making things even better for subsequent years.

• Thing 5: Sign up to Google Reader and subscribe to the RSS feed of the 23 Things blog.
• Thing 6: Find some more feeds to subscribe to.

I honestly do not know how I would survive without RSS feeds. I must have been using them now for around 3 years and in my mind Google Reader is the only way to manage them. At present I have 204 subscriptions – at least half of those are for the blogs of the 23 Things participants, and yes I am reading them all.

I’ve seen a lot of posts on the 23 Things blogs that show the participants can really see the benefit of getting all the updates from favourite website and blogs in one place but there is an expression of concern about how on earth it’s possible to keep up with it all. My advice to you is to organise and prioritise. Organise your subscriptions into folders based on topic to start with and if you’re really keen you can then add numbers to set their priority e.g. 1 = must read, 10 = if I don’t get around to this it’s not the end of the world.

My next tip is to set aside a period of time each day that you will use to catch up on your feeds. I have a quick dip in first thing to zip through those feeds that update multiple times a day (e.g. Mashable and LOLcats) and then take around 30 minutes at lunch to read through the less frequent updaters with a bit more care.

Finally, don’t be afraid to use the sacred “Mark all as read” button. Having just returned from a week’s holiday I have used this on 6/9 of my folders cutting my unread items from around 400 to nearer 150.