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A week without Blackberry
By David | May 30, 2007
After a few days in Asia, I lost my precious Blackberry at the back of a taxi in Bangkok. What I initially felt as an excruciating organ loss, ended up as a very interesting experiment. I could have had a new device with a new SIM card shipped to me but decided against it. I had my laptop with me and managed to inform key people where to reach me at all times in case they needed my immediate help.
Bottom line… I chose when to manage emails and had a tremendous amount of time to think, put things into perspective and potentially come up with good ideas and things to change when I get back to Europe.
We spend an unbelievable amount of time communicating through email, Instant Messaging (IM), phones and now blogs. But communication is not synonymous with production, we don’t have time to think anymore, we’re interrupted by calls, emails and IM sessions hundreds of times a day. I am now convinced this is massively detrimental to good old productivity time. I already banned Blackberries from staff meetings some time ago, I believe I will also enforce some new rules on IM at work. Some of my colleagues ask me questions using IM while sitting less than 5 meters away!
I will now try to decrease communication through Blackberry, email and IM for the next couple of months and experiment whether, beyond making my wife happy, that will materially improve my productivity levels. Somehow I feel I already have my answer…
Sphere: Related ContentTopics: Blackberry, IM |
July 21st, 2007 at 9:07 am
[…] We just need to make sure we still have some good sense left and we can do things with measure. I lost my Blackberry in the back of a taxi in Bangkok a few months ago and was virtually offline a few hours in a row […]