Shauna Moerke is…

I’m going to be a little bossy today because, well, it’s my blog and I can do what I want. Here are some things I fully expect you all to do right now. Put down the coffee cup, step away from the expense report, and take a quick break. Oh wait, you’re reading my blog so you’re already taking a break. Great, I caught you at the right time.

Now, here are the things you need to do (if you haven’t already, of course):

1. Actively participate in the blogging community. Start a blog, branch out and find new blogs to enjoy, start commenting on blogs, join blogging communities (such as Human Resources Bloggers), whatever. There’s a lot of great stuff out there and you’ll be amazed at what you can learn and the people you can meet.

2. Go visit Alltop and poke around. Other HR bloggers have mentioned it before but it bears repeating: Alltop is cool and it is fun poking around their site. What’s even better is that they keep adding stuff everyday so there is always more to see.

3. Update your resume and check job postings and a regular basis. Once again, nothing that hasn’t been said before but it pays to be prepared. The industry my current company is in has been having a hard time lately, and layoffs have already happened. No job is secure anymore.

4. Hug a puppy or kitty. Need I say more?

5. Read a book. Whether you read a book for fun or for your career, do it. I’m an avid reader and I’m always surprised when I hear people talk about how they never read. I just can’t understand it.

6. Network. Contact the people you met at the last (insert random social function here) and see how they are doing. Join Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, or one of the many other social networking sites and see who you can connect with. Join a local HR association, community board, volunteer organization, etc. The more involved you are and the better you stay in contact with the people you meet, the better your social network will be when, not if, you need it someday.

7. Sign up for the HARO. Jenn aka HR Wench turned me on to this. Go sign up on the Help a reporter out site. You’ll get daily emails with requests from reporters looking for information or contacts for stories they are working on. You may not think you could do anything, but you’d be surprised. Just the other day I helped an author with information she needed for a book chapter she was writing on procrastination. Did I ever mention that’s what my Master’s Thesis was about? Never thought that was how I could use it.

8. Find a reason to laugh. It just feels good and releases tension.

Okay, I’m done bossing you around for today. My thoughts for my blog post were a little scattered so I thought I would collect them into one brain dump of a post. This is what happens when I wake up late, sore, and distracted.