Email guru: BlackBerries are irrelevant

• 
• 

 1 of 2

Gallery

By Tim Danton

Posted on 16 Jan 2009 at 12:42

And I think that's where the pain is, not so much at the top level but a level or two down.

And that's where my stuff has hit such a nerve, because really it just says, "look guys, you're gonna have to get really fast at filtering this stuff as it comes in, and not just letting it lie fallow without executive decisions being made about it. Do not let it sit there without making a decision."

A lot of people pay lip service and say, "I'm getting too much email," so which one do you want to stop getting? You can make that happen.

And they say, "Well, I want that one". At some point, you're going to have to say no, I do not need that, I do not want that, get that out of my face. It's very easy just to hit the From button and sort by person and dump 20 at a shot.

So yes, it's still going to take you an hour a day just to keep current with the new stuff coming in, and that's if you're really good at decision making, and really good at keyboard skills. If you're not making executive decisions and you're still typing less than 40 words-per-minute then I'm sorry, grow up!

Don't pretend that you're going to try and be in this world. The keyboard is the most important communication device for the rest of your life, don't kid yourself.

Stop using your mouse. Learn how to use the keyboard, learn how to use shortcuts.

What about instant messaging and social-networking sites - are they a plague on the organised life?

Once again, don't shoot the messenger. They're bulletin boards and flippant notes under the table, and how cool are bulletin boards and slipping notes under the table? Pretty cool. Unless all you're doing is slipping notes under the table and you're letting that be distracting.

If you're not really sure what you're doing then you'll be distracted by whatever is the latest, loudest bright bauble in front of you.

But if you really know what you're doing, you won't let instant messaging get in your way. And obviously a lot of this has to do with your cultural protocols.

Instant messaging is great. I can manage several different conversations going on at once because that's the whole point of this instant messaging.

It's like, look, let me toss it to him, it's a lot easier and quicker than an email, I can get a response as soon as he has a second, and people are taking a tea break on a teleconference and I can keep going with these other conversations and keep them going at the same time.

It's also very cool to slip notes back and forth while you're on the teleconference. There's a lot of really good uses of stuff like that. It's just a different medium in a way that just has a different functionality.

As long as you're conscious about all this stuff, I love it, I love all the stuff that allows you to be more virtual. As long as it allows me to be lazier and more spontaneous and freer, then I'm all for it.

So what technologies do you use yourself then?

I use a [Palm] Treo that my Notes stuff maps to, and I use the e-productivity system, the plug-in that Eric's designed. I use MindManager, it's a mind-mapping thing for a lot of project thinking and planning and meeting agenda development.

And I use plain old Microsoft Office, Excel and Word, stuff like that, and that's pretty much it aside from the Lotus Notes IM tool.

I don't use IM outside of our internal network and LinkedIn is the only social network that I'm using, and it's still extraordinarily experimental to me. I didn't want to get too far into the other stuff, but I was curious just to see what that would be like.