One of the UKs top new-writing theatres The Bush Theatre came to us with the problem:

Playwriting is a lonely job - how do we enable more writers to learn from production and each other to be the best they can be? 

The bushgreen social-publishing platform for writers, producers and directors is our answer.  If you think of it like a mix of Twitter, Facebook and iTunes, you'd be on the right track.  bushgreen is funded by the excellent Jerwood Foundation.

Happily, we got to see a bunch of great presentations at Reboot Britain. The most visceral of which was Howard Rheingold's keynote.

Howard is a pioneering thinker on the future of the web and in his powerful on 21st century literacies and skills, his words felt very much at home for the Digital Health Service. We felt a kindred spirit in the room.

The five key new literacies we need, according to Howard are:

• Attention
• Participation
• Cooperation
• Critical Consumption (or 'crap-detection')
• Network Awareness

These ideas have really fed into our exploration of what are the levels of use of technology that the Digital Health Service works with people on. So far, there appear to be three levels emerging. Two of which Howard refers to here in a recent interview (embedded at the top of this post).

• Functional use: understand and use technology for it's direct functional purpose e.g search via google.
• Skilled use: use technologies creatively and intelligently to for a greater effect and reap the benefits of that effect: e.g event promotion or access, social bookmarking, social networking and content searching via people, verifying integrity of authorship, skills of transparency etc
• Self-aware use / mindfulness: how does your use positively support your short & long-term needs, and the needs of your immediate community (family, workteam, organisation, society, country), and build on your strengths so that every action you take is the most productive it can be. This is where knowing yourself and others is vital.

We believe these last two are the basis for a next generation productivity practice. Something we're very excited about.

A practice of using our technology, time and energy well is now key; since the web and our aligned us of it is - according to NESTA's CEO Jonathan Kestenbaum - central to our economy's recovery and the future wellbeing of the knowledge-workers of the UK.

We recently hosted our digital health drop-in-clinic at NESTA's timely Reboot Britain conference. We had 20 minute slots to listen to people's digital problems and offer the most significant solutions we could think of.

Ranging from pure tech email import compatibility issues, to finding the right personnel via social networking we had a lot of fun hearing what Digital Health means to everyone else! Thanks for all the attendants for booking us out! It was great to talk with you all.

And thanks to the unknown creative who whipped up the Lego logo above.  Awesome promotion - you couldn't buy it...

Following on from our launch event at Demos last month we'll be at the RSA on John Adam St all day long to talk through your digital dilemmas and offer on-to-one advice for you and your organisation. Come along and continue the face to face discussions we started last month, ask us difficult questions or co-design some answers.

To register a slot just visit our handy wiki and follow the instructions.

The wonderful Joanne Jacobs talked about technology enveloping us and as if to prove a point live-streamed the event – which caused some controversy and an interesting debate around privacy and open sharing in the new digital age. Mark O'Neil got heated up over Blackberrys, talked about the new measurements of success, and opened up the discussion around what is needed going forward for digital health. Questions and conversation continued well into the night, and we even got some people to have a play on videoboo and leave us a little message.

A couple of posts and tweets from the night.

We'd love to continue what we started, so feel free to leave comments, contact us, and look out for news of our upcoming digital health drop-in clinic coming soon…

We're very excited to announce our first ever event to open up the discussion around how to cultivate a healthier digital future to benefit people's personal and professional lives is to be held next week at the offices of the extraordinary thinktank Demos on the 27th Jan.

Come along and join the conversation! Registration via the super-useful Eventbrite is here.

Lauren from McCann Erickson says nice things about the digital health workshop we ran for them last week.  Death to new email pop-ups! 

We used the fantastic VideoBoo from the guys at BestBefore Media to create this and a number of other videos on the fly right after the workshop.  Video through your webcam and straight to YouTube.  Delightfully effortless.  More on VideoBoo from David Wilcox here.

Yesterday at our second workshop for the good people over at McCann Erickson, in brainstorming how the people in the room could influence how to turn their company into a very digitally-fit organisation we hit upon a good old piece of wisdom from David Allen's Getting Things Done (or GTD - alternative description here) that I thought was worth reminding and sharing.

There are 3 types of work:

1. Doing pre-defined work
2. Doing work as it shows up
3. Defining your work

We all know the first two, but the third is so easy to neglect or forget.  Defining your work is tidying up your in basket, email, voicemail and working out the next steps on your projects.  Once you've defined your work and are feeling pretty good about it, then we work on how we work. 

What are my good habits?  What are my bad?  What's the nature of my work and what are my goals and standards?  Is that new piece of software actually helping?  Is it over complicating things without returning enough benefit?  Or would 20 mins investment of time one evening really make it start to work brilliantly? If I spent some time figuring out how to share calendars on Google Calendar - would that make a significant difference to the productivity of my team?

Useful reminders like the above can really help us make time for a little perspective and help us get in control of our work, how we work and the digital tools we use to do it.

Photo by Tama Leaver licensed under a Creative Commons license.

Time is our greatest currency, and we can't make more of it. Yikes. As scary as that may or may not be (depending on how Zen you are) it feels worth considering why we all want more time? Answers that work for lots of people: to live life to the full, to be the best we can be, to do the best work we can so we are respected, known and make some difference, to help our friends and loved ones fulfil their potential and perhaps to be as human as we can be.

So here we are in the first month of a new year, ready, frankly, to spend a fair amount of it sighing at a relentless inbox of emails. Given that the average office worker spends up to 4 hours a day in their inbox that could be approximately 1,000 hours of email joy coming up for you in 2009. And life is getting shorter by the second.  Shudder.

So, a challenge - one small (tiny) practice a month to do to reduce the amount of emails you receive. Go on, think of it like taking your life back from the man.

Email detox #1: Unsubscribe from one email newsletter a day for the whole of January.

Most email newsletters should have a 'unsubscribe' link at the bottom. If not try replying to the newsletter with the word 'unsubscribe' in the title of your reply.

Ask yourself - do you actually read them all? If each time one lands in your inbox it's like a promise to yourself you're probably unlikely to keep - how many of them just make you feel, well, guilty? Give yourself a break and unsubscribe. You've done one already? That lighter inbox does look good on you.

PS: just to warn you, about half way this will get painful when you deliberate over that newsletter you just absolutely promised yourself you'd read (likely candidates: Expedia/Lastminute.com). Don't say I didn't warn you. Deep breath.

Here we are, birthed right into 2009 kicking and screaming... well actually, feeling pretty rested after a what seemed like super long festive break.  It's cold though here in London.  Very cold.  Radiators are on.

So, since we're gearing up for a new wave of fresh 2009-y activity here at Digital Health towers we thought it was about time for a refresh of the website - hope you like and please stay tuned while we play with things, move things around a bit and generally add more exciting stuff.

The more exciting stuff is even more exciting as it's being mightily assisted by the lovely Amanda Gore who has joined us to whip our marketing into shape.  So that's ace - welcome Amanda.

Stay tuned folks.