Email guru: BlackBerries are irrelevant

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By Tim Danton

Posted on 16 Jan 2009 at 12:42

Are you an Outlook advocate?

I use Lotus Notes because of other functions. I got into Notes years ago, and I'll keep using Lotus Notes as long as it has list-management capabilities and functionalities. It works fine, and also my technologist just created a systemic plug-in to Lotus Notes that does my stuff better than anything.

He's worked with me for 15 years and I said look, Eric, it's gotta do this and wouldn't it be great if it could do this, and he's built a technology interface that doesn't change any of the native stuff inside Notes that sort of maps to my technology. And I'll be officially endorsing that, if you want to use Lotus Notes and do GTD then there's nothing better than the new productivity system.

But frankly it doesn't matter. Once you really get into this, who cares - whatever makes lists fast and easy that I can see real quick, [that's what matters].

So where does the BlackBerry fit into this? Is it a hindrance or a help?

It depends. To a large degree, BlackBerrys are simply a little louder chain to yank so [you] don't miss really important email.

I mean, I don't have a BlackBerry. I get my email empty every day or two, so what the heck, people know how to get me.

And if you're using a BlackBerry simply as an email cellphone, simply so you can take advantage of little windows of time, then I say okay. But the problem is that probably half of the emails I get have URL links and other things that I want to do real quickly right then, that I could do in a couple of seconds if I had the power of my PC or my laptop available to me.

Don't make me then have to close [the email] up as I can't do that right then because I'm sitting there on a little handheld thumb device. Give me a break.

So to a large degree BlackBerries are irrelevant and another way to avoid getting your life clean and starting from a zero basis every 24 hours.

So that's a little bit of a cranky assessment on it. I haven't gone out and done serious surveys or research about all that but from what I can tell from the people that I see they just need a louder chain to yank.

But you see a lot of high-powered executives, presumably, who've been given these BlackBerries and been told they need them.

To a large extent, high-powered executives need that kind of power to bully through the crap that they let pile up in their lives.

Is technology making things worse for some people? Say for a high-powered executive who now has to handle voicemail, a BlackBerry, a huge volume of email - is their life worse or better now than 20 years ago?

For a very high-powered executive this truly has never been an issue - they just hire people to filter. And that's always been true and is true now. The issue is that there's a lot more people further down the food chain that are now living in that high-powered world, who can't afford people to filter.

So that's the issue. That you've got a lot more people who now have the executive function without necessarily a lot of the resources available to manage the filtering and triage function.

Also, it's easier when you're the top guy to know the top three things you need to work on, so forget everything else. Whereas if you're one or two levels down the food chain you don't have that luxury.

You're having to spin a lot of very important plates and keep them all spinning at the same time, so both your hunger for and inability to get rid of potentially relevant information has actually multiplied exponentially.