Damian Holmes

Well, I decided to relaunch chinalandscapearchitect.com as two separate blogs – chinese version and an english version. They will cover the same topics and posts with the text translated into Simplified Chinese from English and will be focused on Landscape Architecture. I have done this for two reasons

1.   The chinalandscapearchitect.com (chinese version) (english version)  blog could be more detailed about landscape architecture and China. I want to use chinalandscapearchitect.com as a tool to educate Chinese and English speaking people about Landscape Architecture. The basics and the detailed areas of landscape architecture from design to site management. Often Landscape Architecture blogs are too focused on one specific location or area (eg design, technical, plants,) without offering definitions or ideas that stimulate people to further explore more areas of landscape architecture. Landscape Architecture is my passion and has been seen the age of 10 and I feel that I need to share my knowledge with people so they can further understand Landscape Architecture and what landscape architects do.

2. I can have the freedom on my personal blog (damianholmes.com) to explore topics that relate to everything in  World from business to everyday things. I felt pressure that my personal blog has my name on it and I would have to be solely focused on Landscape and my professional career to promote my business SUSTAIN.DS.

As apart of my setting goals for 2010 I set 5 words – one of which was Simple.

Simple Ideas. Simple Concepts. Simple Processes and Simplify.

Tonight I decided to Simplify my web reading. In 2009, I read too much business news, business trends, social media trends which often was great for small talk but often lead to information overload that really in the end didn’t help move my ideas move forward. I had created too much noise. Most of what I read is via my Google Reader which I open every morning and spend about an hour scanning the information and another hour at night. I use this as a good way to research and gain ideas for my business and sites.

Over the last couple of years I have added newspapers, magazines, blogs, zines and other RSS feeds. However, I realised that I needed to simplify the amount and type of information I was reading. So, I went through each category – business, landscape, architecture, entrepreneur, news, etc and culled each to 2 to 5 sources from 10-20.

How did I do it? Well, I gauged how much I really gained from each source and how useful it was to me last year. Also if I thought that I could get the same content from another one of my sources I culled it. I also  found during 2009 that I often got duplicate information from multiple sources especially US-based newpapers on China or Asia. I also culled a lot of the USA based magazines as some of what I read was useful, but I decided I need to focus more on Asia were I am based.

To concentrate more on Asia and other topics I searched Alltop.com for RSS feeds and added 2 sources maximum to some categories.

I am also Simplifying my social media habits – less twitter/foursquare and more writing ideas down and then thinking of ways of implementing(doing) them.

I also decided recently that I needed to reduce the number of my sites from 5 to 3 and probably soon to be 2 (not including my blog!) so that I can spend more time on my design studio SUSTAIN.DS and World Landscape Architect.

I hope this gives you something to think about and what you will do in 2010. What are you doing in 2010 to simplify your life?
Leave it in the comments section or email me

Wow, time flies. I didn’t realise its been 3 months since I posted something. Funny thing is that I have posts in draft form on here but they are mainly rants.

Also I haven’t been able to find the time to get my thoughts together as running three industry blogs (worldla.com chinalandscapearchitect.com UAElandscapearchitect.com) and trying to start-up a new business is not ideal and running Tweetups & Shanghai Twitterville (although thats not that time consuming)

Something is going to give soon, think it will be one or two of the blogs as they haven’t made me any good money in a long time. Not that is what I started them for originally I had another 4 landscape architecture blogs but closed each one due to time.

However, maybe its time to get serious about getting them to the next level as ezines or pro blogs like inhabitat or treehugger. But, these have teams of people and companies behind them. Something to think about and will make a decision about by the end of 2009.

Also I took some interesting photos of the USA while was there and of the ever changing Shanghai which i have to add to a Picasa stream and place on here.