Digital Common Sense

I spent the last few days at the VoIP Developer Conference in Santa Clara. Make no mistake, this was session of very busy, very engaged, highly connected people. In talking with several of them, a few people asked how it is I do all the things I do. So let me begin by saying, I’ve carried a large project volume and worked on a number of things concurrently for years. Like writing, it’s something you have to do every day. But just getting through the day can indeed be a challenge.

I thought I’d mention one aspect of how I personally manage the hyperconnected getting things done issue, because I notices many victims of being so connected at the conference.

We are today, fr too often, interrupt driven. The phone rings - we stop what we’re doing. “You’ve got mail” - we stop what we’re doing. In the tech sector, losing a train of thought to an interrupt can easily mean we never recover and follow something through to conclusion. Since I write a lot, I’m particularly sensitive to this.

Several conversations about presence online made me think about this more, because I use all the tools at my disposal to manage presence.

In the hyperconnected world, I work at multiple laptops, but I’ll stick to two primaries - my personal laptop used for *my* stuff, and my employers for *my day job* stuff. Other tools without which I would be lost include thumb drives, my Treo (mine), my Blackberry (employer), and my two-way pager (employer).

For my employer, the laptop picks up mail every 5 minutes or so from the Exchange server, but it doesn’t notify me in any way when it does so. My Blackberry pick up mail constantly, but doesn’t notify. My Blackberry vibrates when I have a meeting reminder, the phone rings, or I get an SMS message. I can’t afford to be interrupted by email all day and night. I can’t stop what I’m doing to read email real-time. My real-time is full and busy.

The pager is really all about incident response. I help coordinate a cyber incident response team. Cyber security alert issues go there. Urgent things go there. It’s a 24X7 lifeline in the event something really important breaks. Some email, based on filters, alerts my pager. Those are definitions I’ve built. People who are important enough to interrupt me. These are few. Voice mail on my office line alerts me that I have a message, but I respond at my choosing. My Blackberry as a cell phone gets minimal inbound calls. Caller ID helps determine whether I answer. Vendors are notorious for calling my cell phne because they have the number and think they are important. With one or two exceptions, I will never answer a call from a vendor on my Blackberry. They aren’t nearly as important to me as they are to them.

My personal laptop only retrieves mail when I tell it to. No automated delivery any more. My Treo receives mail from one account automatically. The others are only when I tell it to. It doesn’t alert me to new mail. It’ll be there when I choose to look at it. It does alert to meetings, phone calls and SMS messages. For the most part, I answer every phone call to my Treo, assuming I am not in a meeting or on another line.

What I noted at the conference was how many people were controlled by their Treo or Blackberry. These are tools to help us, yet we defer control of our mental focus to a device clipped on our belt. Why would you do that? You time, your attention, your brainpower are too important to allow that kind of control. If you think you’re so important that you need to be notifed of every email, you’re mistaken. But if you are being notified instantly of every message, you are flushing much of your time down the toilet. You’re giving control of your attention, your focus, to things better handled later.

You can always look at your mobile. In between meetings or while you wait for one to start. Pay attention to how many idle spots there are in your day when you can do this. There are more than you can count. Use them more effectively. You control your attention, not your devices.

Duty calls, and I’m off.

Technorati Tags: hyperconnected, mobile devices. getting things done, attention, focus

Filed by Ken at 8:03 am under Mobility & Handheld, Technology