Tips & Tricks: How I use my Toucan Space

I 💓 my Toucan Space

If we haven’t met in my Space yet, let me know! Happy to grab a coffee or a glass of wine. I’ll show you around.

Scheduling

Our Events product is awesome for planning and running large events, but for day-to-day use, Spaces is the bomb. Having a permanent URL seems like a small thing, but to me, it’s night and day. Now, when I schedule a meeting with someone, all I have to do is create a calendar invite and drop in my Space URL. No more having to do the work twice by also scheduling it on Toucan.

Maybe I’m lazy, or maybe I schedule too many meetings 🙂. In either case, I now use Toucan Spaces many times a day with no friction at all.

Personalization

I like to personalize things with the artifacts: books, CDs, artwork, and bric-à-brac I pickup here and there. As I’ve complained before, digital life is robbing us of the ability to surround ourselves with all these things. Sorry, but NFTs don’t make the cut.

I can’t bring all my things into my Toucan Space, but I get around that limitation by abusing the Meeting Spots feature.

In large events Spots are meeting places. In my Space they are signposts of things I care about right now. If you come for a visit, you’ll see Spots floating around with the names of albums or composers. That’s the music I’m currently playing during my hikes. You’ll also see spots with the names of books I’m reading, and you’ll very quickly get the idea that I’m on the undisciplined end of the reader spectrum. As of now I think I have five books going in parallel. On occasion I’ll add a spot with food I’ve recently liked, or my current location.

You can bet that as soon as our designers give me the ability to add even more things to my Space, I will!

Remote Meetings

So what do I do in my Space.

Lots of meetings! I know that sounds boring, but it usually isn’t. When things get dull I have the uncanny ability to offend people, which has a tendency to spice things up.

Brainstorming

I also hold “brainstorming” sessions to work through new ideas. They aren’t always very brainy, but they tend to be collaborative, even if it’s in a let’s-waste-time-together kind of way.

Hangouts

My primary use of Events was for hangouts, both professional and personal. Now I use my Toucan Space, even though it’s currently limited to 50 people. Some people will be surprised to hear that I don’t host bigger hangouts, but the ability to offend people does, it turns out, impact the number of people who want to get together with me on a casual basis.

No Time Limits

Events are limited to two hours. That’s not enough. I like very loooong events.

One of the best days of my life took place in New York. It was a real-time reading of Lolita. Dozens of people were given a section of the book to read. Each brought his/her own voice to it, although Nabokov obviously produced the common thread. People were encouraged to leave for meals, bathroom breaks, etc. I sat through the entire novel.

I’ve sat through “Einstein on the Beach” several times. Watching Peter Brook’s nine hour production of “The Mahabharata” was also one of the best days of my life. You won’t be surprised if I tell you that the Ring Cycle operas are amongst my favorites.

As I said, I like long events. I like anything that distorts my sense of time. Events didn’t do that for me. I was forever bumping up against time limits. Spaces – ironically – have freed me from that time constraint.

One of these days I’m going to organize a reading in mine. Current candidate is Hamlet. Lolita a close runner-up. If you’re interested, let me know.