Communications Triage

I’m a very connected person. I’ve had a BlackBerry for almost 10 years now. I was the only person in my middle school with a cell phone in the 7th grade long before that was old to carry a cell phone. I have more email accounts than I care to think about.

Intervention

It is time for a change. Between work emails, various web site emails, Twitter, Skype, IM, Facebook and phone calls, I have been checking my BlackBerry’s (yes, plural) every 5 minutes 18 hours a day for the last few years. It’s not the life I want to live and I expect you don’t either (so it’s reasonable NOT to expect me to do it).

I deleted all of my accounts from my BlackBerry except one, which I am setting strict filters on. If you’re family or the bank, you get through. I signed up for NutshellMail which checks my various email accounts and sends me digest emails at times of my choosing. I set all of my phones to forward to the one I use most and it has YouMail on it, which transcribes voicemails into emails so I can keep track of calls more easily.

When I get home, the work BlackBerry is off, not silent or vibrate, but off until the next morning. The personal BlackBerry gets put into phone only mode since I get far fewer calls (that are usually more time sensitive and friends/family) than I do all of the other messages.

So Far So Good

I’ve only been doing this since yesterday, but it already feels pretty good.

Have you had to conduct an intervention with your methods of communication and if so, what tools have helped you the most to find the perfect balance?

Tagged as: BlackBerry, Facebook, Instant messaging, Mobile phone, NutshellMail, Skype, Twitter, YouMail

{ 2 comments }

Mark February 17, 2009 at 5:46 pm: Hi Nick,

Thanks for the great post and for including NutshellMail into your new routine. I hope your intervention was successful! I also wanted to tell you that NutshellMail has released a new Facebook application which you can check out at http://facebook.nutshellmail.com.

Cheers,
mark
Nick Bostic February 18, 2009 at 8:38 am: Thanks for stopping by. NutshellMail has definitely been a great part of streamlining my routine. It’s great to get one email per couple of hours than the usual set of close to 100. I’m trying out the Facebook integration now too, thanks for the heads up.

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