Every time I encounter an article like this one, I wind up checking my own behavior when it comes to the way I deal with email. And I learn that it has changed, in many ways reflecting the changes taking place in the world outside. From being a committed Blackberry user of many years standing, I now switch between iOS, Android and Windows Phone 7 as my fancy takes me, assisted in no small measure by the tremendous convenience of online backup, and our SmartEmail offering. The latter is particularly important, as I can now seamlessly hook up to my email from any handset that’s currently caught my fancy in less than 5-mins; as a matter of fact, I can connect from the multiple devices that I use at any time, with the complete confidence that my email will continue to remain perfectly synchronized across all my devices. Which also means that I can deactivate a device and surrender it to whoever may be interested in even less time than that!
So what has this to do with my email consumption behavior? Simple – I’ve set a bunch of pretty tight rules that control which messages can make it to my handheld. And, rather than have mail pushed into my device, I choose to ‘pull’ at 15-min intervals. AND, I use an app that puts my device into Aircraft-mode from 2230 to 0630 the next morning. The last, of course, is a personal decision, and one that you could make too regardless of the handset you use – in fact, Blackberry lets you do this in the most convenient fashion!
Does this affect my work-interactions with colleagues? As a matter of fact, no, because we’ve been using a variety of online collaboration tools, that make one-to-many interactions far more productive. Which in turn is the seed of the idea that’s presently called – gosocio!
But before this turns out to be yet another plug for our services, please read the article that’s the reason for this posting – A Time to Tune Out, by Roger Cohen, in the New York Times.
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