Posts Tagged ‘twitter’
The Relationship Between Happiness & Productivity, Part 2
Yesterday I wrote about making progress toward your goals as it relates to both happiness and productivity. Today I want to share with you one other interesting result from the Real Simple magazine happiness survey. They reported it as “3 things that the happiest women do.” Although I bet it’s true for men as well.
The three things the happiest women do are:
- they cancel appointments to get more time alone
- they don’t always answer the phone
- they know how to say no.
These are all excellent points and they support my earlier post about taking control as a key to productivity. It seems to make sense that productivity and happiness would be related, as no one would likely associate “stressed out and unproductive” with happiness. When the minutes and hours of your life pass with you always doing things for, with, or because of other people, this is a signal that you are not in control of your time. And if other people are controlling your time, in a very real way, they are controlling your life.
So it’s important to get back in control, which will make you not only more productive, but happier. Taking the first point about canceling appointments: It’s important to recognize when you are over-committed, and sometimes just begging out of a few appointments or plans you’ve made is a great way to catch your breath and get back in control.
The second one is something I say to my clients and in my classes all the time: “just because the phone is ringing, doesn’t mean you have to answer it.” And it’s not just the phone. You can take the same attitude for email, instant messages, text messages, Twitter, faxes, snail mail, and all of the other communication methods we are subjected to.
Knowing how to say no is important but I think there’s more to it. Sometimes it’s not as easy to “just say no,” especially if the person asking is your boss. However, this is where having your to-do list out of your head, where you can see it, comes in especially handy. You can only truly manage things when you can see them, and you can only see them when they are out of your head. When your boss comes in to drop yet another assignment on your desk, having your task list available gives you ammunition for a conversation. You can discuss your workload with them, and your priorities, and have a useful dialogue about your workload. This really helps to put you back in control of your time, rather than being helpless to just accept the work that’s always being “dumped on” you.
Thanks for reading, and please feel free to comment.
Three Secrets to Personal Productivity
Productivity is such a big subject and there is a lot to learn, with more every day. One of the things I am working on personally, and answering a lot of questions about, is how to incorporate social media into my life. One of the biggest fears I hear, about Twitter especially, is “How do I make the time? How do I incorporate yet ANOTHER communication tool into my life?” It’s a great question. What I’m learning is that the answer is the same for Twitter and other social media as it was for email before that (which most everyone is still struggling with) as it was for the internet before that, and for the fax machine before that, and for the telephone before that. Many productivity experts have their own “big picture” points about managing the details of their lives. Here are mine…
The first is the most important, although they are all related. The secret to productivity is control. That’s why I call my process the Empowered Productivity System. There are three components to control and if you can master them, managing the details of your life will become much easier and less stressful. You need to learn to master control over information, control over the technology that information comes in on, and control over your own behavior and focus. A couple of brief points about each…
If you, like most people I meet, spend your day in reactive mode, instead of in proactive mode, then information is controlling you, rather than the opposite. If you have your Facebook and LinkedIn pages, and your TweetDeck or other Twitter stream, open all the time on your desktop, along with your email client open and messages automatically downloading, plus your notification sounds on your iPhone or Blackberry, then you are not controlling your technology, it is controlling you. Maybe you don’t leave these things open, but you can’t control your urge to check one or all of them every few minutes or less, or you find yourself almost never looking at your to-do list, or maybe you don’t even have your to-do list out of your head (more on this below). Then you are not controlling your own behavior and focus. Control is the key. It might not be easy, but it is simple.
Next tip: you hear money “gurus” saying this all the time: pay yourself first. It applies to your time as much as it does to your money. Spending your time in reactive mode all day means you are prioritizing everyone else’s questions, requests, information, etc., over your own stuff. Presumably you have put things on your to-do list, or they are floating around in your brain, because they have some significance, some importance to you. If you spend little or no time being proactive, checking things off your list…if your list gets longer more often than it gets shorter, then you are not paying yourself first. Here’s the easiest way to implement this: when you start work in the morning, resist the urge to go straight to your email. Go to your to-do list, be proactive and productive for an hour or more, and only then switch to your email messages. Anything you were going to read at 8am can probably keep until 9:30am.
Last thought, and if you know me, you’ve probably heard me say it many times: you can only truly manage things when you can see them, and you can only see them when they are out of your head. Human beings are only capable of holding one conscious, coherent thought in our heads at a time. Everything else is swirling around in that haze that causes stress. Our brains our not designed to manage the banal details of our lives. Our brains are much better at problem solving, big picture, creative-type thinking. If they worked in such a way that we could reach into our mind, and pluck out the exact piece of information, exactly when we needed it, then perhaps we wouldn’t need calendars, planners, to-do lists, contact managers, etc. But we DO need these things. So you should use them, and learn how to use them well. You need a good set of tools, that work well together, and support you in a logical, meaningful way (check out this post and this post for more on this). Having these will allow you to free your mind of the details, allowing you to do the things your brain is good at, and this, in turn, will lower your stress levels.
Just raising your awareness of these three points will put you on the path to improving your personal productivity. As always, I’m happy to hear your comments. And if you’re one of those early adopters who have found a way to work Twitter into your life, please consider following me @mnthomas. For more on why I think Twitter is useful, read this.
Mastering Control Over Email & Twitter, Conclusion
One last thing I want to address is something I get asked about a lot, which is how to file your email messages that you don’t want to delete. It’s actually an easy answer.
The way that I suggest you file is categorically, breaking things down into the major areas of your life. For me it’s business-related emails and personal emails. Realize that the search features in email clients are very good. You should rely on these rather than spending lots of time creating folders and sub-folders. The more folders you have, the harder it can be to find things! If you have just a few folders, and a search feature, you should be able to find what you need in a matter of seconds. One final note, if you responded to the message, delete the one that’s in your inbox, and file the one from your “sent” folder.
Here’s one final tip on how to get started implementing everything I’ve outlined over the last several days. If you want to start with a with zero inbox today, right now, first you need to shut off that automatic download in your email client if you haven’t already. Then, create a subfolder called “old emails to process,” move everything before yesterday into that folder. Process all of your emails from today and yesterday using the process I’ve outlined here, until you have zero messages in your inbox. Go back and process the others when you have some time, or wait until something comes up (someone says, “did you get the email I sent you last week?”) It’s not as drastic as deleting everything and starting over, but achieves the same result. When you’ve gotten to zero, RESIST the urge to click that send/receive button again! Go do something else! Work off your to-do list for a while, go out and experience “Twitter 3D,” aka the real world! =)
Mastering Control Over Email & Twitter, Step 4
A couple of days ago I promised you 4 steps to conquering your email. In the last few days, I’ve written about 3: learning to controlling the information using a process, learning to control the technology, and learning to control your behavior. They are easy in the sense that they are not complicated or difficult to execute. But probably the hard part is going to be in changing your behavior. That’s never easy. But I promise you that it will introduce some peace and serenity into your life if you’re not constantly multi-tasking.
The 4th step is about easily sorting the important from the unimportant. So of course you need a good spam filter. If you are getting more than a few spam messages a day, you should look for another solution. The technology has advanced and it’s worth spending some time on. But in messages that aren’t spam, one of the easiest ways to sort the important from the unimportant is that probably the information that comes from a real human (friend, family, co-worker) is probably more important than “robo-messages” (coupons, newsletters, notifications, marketing messages). Is that a fair statement?
Well some people use “rules” in their email client so that some messages automatically go into a certain folder. This is one way to handle it, but personally I don’t like it. It’s bad enough to see how many unread messages are in my inbox, if I had those high numbers in other mailboxes too it would stress me out. Plus it wouldn’t be as efficient if I had to click around through a bunch of folders to see what needed my attention. Also the concern there is that I never get around to looking at some of those folders, so my number of emails grows and grows, both stressing me out and perhaps causing problems with my email client.
There is now a much better solution to “robo-mails” and I think it’s the biggest time saver I have seen in a long time. It’s called Otherinbox and if you haven’t gotten yourself an account yet, I suggest you visit now and get one “tout de suite.”
Tomorrow will be one more post on this topic, where I will expand a little bit about a topic I get a lot of questions about: filing your email messages…
Mastering Control Over Email & Twitter, Step 3
Ok, so I outlined steps one and two to managing email and Twitter, and I left you with a question about multi-tasking. If you leave your email client open, Twitter feed, Facebook & LinkedIn pages constantly open on your desktop, you are forcing yourself to multi-task all the time. The question posed yesterday was, “is multi-tasking good or bad?” To answer that, we have to take a look at what multi-tasking really is: It’s a myth. In reality, human beings can only hold a very small number (maybe one!) of thoughts in our head at the same time. So we’re not actually doing things simultaneously, we’re actually switching back and forth rapidly between those things. It’s called cognitive switching, and the ability to do it peaks around age 20. When switching between two tasks, you are probably giving at most 40% of your attention to each of those tasks, and the other 20% at least, is required for the switching. Study after study has shown that switching both lengthens the time it takes to complete a task, and decreases the quality or accuracy of the output. I read a study recently that determined that driver inattention is the cause of 80 percent of all car crashes, and the most common distraction is use of cell phones. And guess what? The numbers are the same whether the person was dialing, talking, or listening!
So we covered controlling the information and controlling the technology. Let’s talk about controlling your habits and your behavior, because that’s the hardest part. What’s the difference between Lance Armstrong & other cyclists or Michael Phelps & other swimmers? They probably have more natural ability than others, but not all others. The difference is the ability to focus. Athletes winning competitions, surgeons performing successful surgeries, scientists making breakthroughs….None of these happen without being “in the zone.” What’s “the zone?” It’s focus. So the question becomes, “how can you learn to focus better, so that you are better at the things you do?”
When you are working on important tasks, you will perform better if they are receiving 100% of your attention. Which means having the willpower to close your email, Twitter feeds, Facebook, etc. And the only way you will be convinced to do this, is if you value the benefits of focus.
Remember that cognitive switching means that you are only giving at most 40% of your attention to the task at hand. Some tasks only need 40% of your attention, or less. I often catch up with friends over the phone while I do household chores like empty the dishwasher. Chores require much less than 40% of my attention, so my friends are getting the bulk of my attention (which might be more than they are giving me! =)
But does the work you perform for your clients deserve more than 40% of your attention? Does driving deserve more than 40% of your attention, when it could mean the difference in life or death, for you or someone else? Does your family deserve more than 40% of your attention?
Let me be clear: I’m not telling you never to multi-task. I’m just suggesting that you be more selective, and more thoughtful, about when you do it, rather than having that be your default method of operating. If your email (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc) is always open and always downloading, then nothing ever gets 100% of your attention. Make sure there are times that you can devote to doing nothing but tackling the things on your to-do list, and when those important things come up, give them all of your attention. This is not news to you. I’m sure you do it when you have something really, really important to do, right? Well, does that happen often? And if not, does that mean that the bulk of the things you spend your life doing, aren’t really that important? Or is just that you never get to the important stuff because you’re too busy splitting your time between unimportant things, because it feels more productive?
We’ve talked about 3 steps so far, control over information, control over technology, and control over your behavior. Come back tomorrow and we’ll discuss the 4th step.
Mastering Control Over Email & Twitter, Step 2
Yesterday was step 1: mastering control over the information. Next, you need to learn to master control over the technology it comes in on. Having your email client always open, with messages automatically downloading and giving you an indicator, means that your email is controlling YOU. Same is true for your Twitter client, and your browser windows with Facebook & LinkedIn pages up. Here are a few steps that integrate a process for controlling information and for controlling technology:
- For email, turn OFF the automatic download, so that messages only come in when YOU click send/receive (puts the control back in your hands, rather than keeping you at the mercy of constantly flowing email messages).
- Set aside time to click that send/receive button only 2-3 times per day, allowing yourself at least one full minute (or until you’re done, whichever comes first) for each message.
- Be sure that in that minute, you have moved the message out of your inbox (delete it, file it, or move it to your to-do list). Your email tool should allow you to easily convert emails to tasks. If you don’t have a good system for your to-do list, consider reading my earlier post Are Your Productivity Tools Complicating Your Life.
- Take the same approach with your Twitter feeds and your other social media tools. Yes, Twitter is like a constant “great” party, but sometimes you have to be ok with missing the party to stay home, if you catch my drift. Put another way (from @cjromb): think of Twitter like a river, jump into the flow every now and then, but accept that you can’t touch every drop of water.
I know that you are thinking, “I can’t possibly do that!” It’s a common response, so let’s talk about what’s going on when you aren’t doing this…
If you are constantly checking your emails, (not to mention your Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter Feeds), what you are forcing yourself to do, is to constantly multi-task. Tomorrow I’ll continue the post where we’ll address whether multi-tasking good or bad, and later I’ll discuss the other two steps for mastering control over email and Twitter.
Mastering Control Over Email & Twitter, Step 1
The secret to personal productivity is mastering control. You need control over the information you receive on a daily basis, control over the tools that bring you that information, and control over your own behavior. If you can master control over these three things, you will be the most productive, and the most relaxed, all the time.
The biggest thing I hear people struggling with lately is communication. There are so many ways to receive information now that it’s having a real impact on how people think about their personal productivity. So to learn how to control communication, you need a good process. And by process I mean a real, step-by-step, I-could-explain-it-to-you-if-you-asked, methodology. Taking email, for example: most people’s “process” for managing email is “skim, then skip to the next one.” Does that sound familiar? You need to figure out why it is you are skipping over messages: it’s probably either that:
- you don’t know the answer
- you don’t feel like dealing with it now
- you think it will take too long
- you are looking for “just the important ones.”
So I suggest that the first component in your process be that you set aside time, every single day, to actually “process” your email messages. All of your messages, not just the important ones. During processing, start by allowing yourself at least one whole minute for each message. If you can read it in 10 seconds, and then would normally skip to the next one, allow yourself those extra 50 seconds and I’ll bet you’ll figure out what to do with it (and don’t leave it in your inbox!) The “stopping to think” is the biggest barrier to get over. You won’t actually need a whole minute for each of them, and you may need more than a minute for others. This can help to protect you from the urge to check your email when you don’t really have time. The same is true for your Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. Set aside time each day (how often and for how long is up to you, but I suggest that it should be LESS than you originally think, and you should decide how long you’re going to spend before you log in. Set a timer if necessary.)
So those are just a few things to think about to get you on the road to an actual process for dealing with information, so that you can master control over it. Tomorrow, we’ll talk about step 2: mastering control over the technology. If you have comments or ideas you’d like to share, I welcome them.
Confessions of a (Highly Productive) iPhone Addict
(also read the update to this post here.)
I’ve heard people say many times that they don’t want an iPhone or a “CrackBerry” because they don’t want to be that connected. “People already have too many ways to reach me, I don’t want to have to be available 24/7.” My response is always the same: you don’t. Just because you have a phone, doesn’t mean it has to be on. Just because it’s on, doesn’t mean to have to answer it if it rings. The same goes for email on your phone. In fact, you can have all the advantages of a smartphone without email. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, people! It’s so handy to have all of the other features available, particularly on an iPhone because there are so many. But the fact remains, YOU can be in control. In fact, that’s the secret to productivity. Mastering control over the details of your life (including the technology they come in on) so that they don’t control you.
So let me share some details about the way I use my iPhone in a typical day. It’s a lot. But it’s for MY convenience, not other people’s. Everything mentioned below is done with no other technology besides the iPhone and Apps I’ve loaded, with the exception of my external portable speaker.
I’m often reading something, or listening to something, on my iPhone before I go to bed in the evening, so it’s usually on my nightstand overnight. However, it’s usually off, unless I’m out of town, at which point I put it in flight mode (no calls in the middle of the night) and then set the alarm to wake me in the morning to my music. When I wake in the morning, I’ll usually turn it on, check my calendar for the day’s appointments, check the weather (both help me decide what to wear), and then I’ll usually check my Twitter feed on Tweetie. All of that takes me less than five minutes. If there is a link to an article from Twitter that I think I might find interesting, Tweetie has a very convenient button that reads, “mail this link.” I can send it to myself for processing with my email later.
Then my phone comes with me, where I plug it into a portable external speaker so that I can listen to music, an audio book, or a podcast while I shower and dig through my closet to get ready for the day. It also has the time handy so that I can make sure I’m not running late, and oh yeah, let me call up the map to see how far away that appointment is.
Then it comes in the car with me, where I turn on my Bluetooth headset and make a few calls (this is not safe, and I’m trying to wean myself away. Did you know that talking while driving impairs your ability as much as drinking and driving?! Scary!). So then I plug it into my car’s audio system to continue the music, ebook, or podcast, or some mixture of all of them.
I arrive at the meeting where I am the speaker. I set up the timer on my iPhone to keep me on track (again, flight mode, ensuring no calls or texts come in while I’m speaking). Any follow-ups from the meeting I jott to myself on the way back to the car. Someone asks if I’m free next Wednesday; let me consult my calendar. Next meeting is with a potential client, so I’ll check for their website address from my contacts, and tap to review it from the parking lot before I head in. After that I head to lunch and while I’m eating I check my voicemail, email, and tweets. Really I’m just scanning email messages here for my convenience. And by the way, on my iPhone, my “Fetch” settings for email are set to manual. So my email only downloads when I instruct it to. I’ll “process” the important emails later at my computer. Twitter usually gives me great reading material for while I eat.
So then I head back to my office, and set the iPhone to play some classical music while I work for several hours. The phone rings and not only do I get a name and number, but also a picture so I can decide if I’m going to answer. When a text shows up the options are “close” or “reply.” Since I’m working, one tap on “close” and I’m back to my work, barely interrupted. Now I’m starting to think about dinner, so I check Grocery iQ to make sure I’ve noted everything I need, and I dash off to the grocery store, where I check them off as I shop. When I get home, I plug into the external speaker again to listen to an audio book, call up the recipe on Safari, and cook dinner. After dinner I walk the dog with my husband, snap a picture of the beautiful sunset, email it to a friend and post it on Twitter and Facebook using Ping.fm in Safari. I’m involved in my neighborhood association so I also snap a picture of a broken sign and email it to the chair of the maintenance committee. When we get home, we start talking about a movie tomorrow night, so I call up Movies to see what’s playing and maybe buy tickets.
I already mentioned how I use it before I go to sleep at night. All of these uses have one thing in common: they enable conveniences for me, not others. I manage all the features so that I am in control of my time, and I don’t let distractions interrupt me when I’m busy. I would suggest that there are two important things to consider when pondering a phone upgrade: how many conveniences will it add to your life, and do you have the discipline to control it, rather than letting it control you? This same logic, in case you were wondering, can also be applied to many of the other ways to communicate like instant messaging, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Learn the benefits that are available in participating, and then learn how to incorporate them into your life so that you are in control.
Thanks for reading! You may also be interested in the update of this post.)
Mac Shortcuts
Some friends asked me on Twitter to elaborate on some Mac shortcuts I mentioned in this post. I wrote about how I’m using QuickSilver and Fluid to access things quickly on my Mac. QuickSilver comes in really handy to quickly “do things with things.” What the heck does that mean? Well, first of all it works as a launcher. If there are too many programs that you use to fit comfortably on your Dock, but it also feels like too many clicks to go to Applications to find the program, QS comes in handy here. Once you install QS, you can select an activation sequence. I used F1, then enter. On my laptop keyboard, it’s Fn+F1. On my external keyboard, it’s just F1. This launches a small window where I can type the first couple of letters of the program I want. It shows me the closest match, and then selecting “enter” completes the action I’ve programmed. In my case, the default action is “launch.” So, for example, I type F1+”Add”+Enter and Address Book opens.
QuickSilver also allows you to quickly perform many other tasks, with many other file types, not just applications. Type the first few letters of a document you were working on recently, and get lots of choices including open it, copy it, emai it, etc. Many thanks to @MegaJustice for showing me this a long time ago.
Now, Fluid I learned about by using OtherInbox (as if you needed another reason to use OIB. If you aren’t yet, Sign. Up. Now! BUT, I’m using OIB on the beta site, and it doesn’t seem to work with Fluid. If OIB staff reads this, please comment.) Fluid is an app called a “site specific browser.” What this means is that if there is an application you use often on the web, you can use Fluid to make it like it’s a desktop app. For example, I’m not using Tweetdeck or other Twitter aggregator, because I haven’t been using Twitter that long and I had just figured out how to use the Twitter web page, so I didn’t want to complicate things with another program right away. So rather than launching Firefox, and then navigating to Twitter, I create Twitter in a site specific browser using Fluid. So then I type Fn+F1+Tw+Enter. Twitter launches in it’s own, standalone “browser window,” which actually looks just like a desktop app with it’s own menus & stuff. You can even put the icon in your Dock and launch from there if you want to. Very cool, and very fast.
If you have more questions, please feel free to email me, or post a comment here and I will reply. I hope that this information will save you some time! And if you’re not already following me on Twitter, I’m @mnthomas.
How Twitter SAVES Time?!
Ok, so file that under “things I never thought I’d say.” And don’t get me wrong. Twitter can be a huge time vortex. But I have discovered that I am not alone in giving Twitter another chance (see Kathy Sierra’s blog post. I saw her @SXSW this week and she is now among the Twitterati). I live in Austin where if you don’t know about a new technology 5 minutes after it debuts, you’re way behind. So I gave Twitter a shot more than a year ago. I hated it. And even now, too many people still think “trying to decide what to have for lunch” is an acceptable post. It’s not. But what I realized about the first time I tried Twitter, is that I was doing it wrong. Here’s what I learned.
Twitter can be a great way to stay in touch with your friends. I heard someone discussing “start-up costs” as being a barrier to lasting connections with people. I think this is a great analogy. If you meet someone, or even if it’s an old friend, but you don’t talk with them for a while, that time lag can be a barrier to reconnecting with them. What if something tragic happened in their life lately? Or even without tragedy, you know if you call them, if will probably have to be a long conversation while you catch up. And while you may really want to do it, finding time for that long conversation is hard to do. Which makes it less likely to happen. If you were following each other on Twitter, you’d know what was going on in each others’ lives, and so now there is no barrier to connecting in “3D Twitter,” aka real life. =) And here’s a bonus time saver for using Twitter rather than email: Tweets almost never require a response. Chris Sacca said @SXSW that your [email] inbox is a to-do list, to which anybody can add an action item (and BTW, I wasn’t in his talk – I heard it on Twitter.)
Tweets can actually be a quick and easy way to stay connected to a lot of people. It can help you find connection points with people (my friend Steve Harper, the Ripple Guy, has been raving about this to me for months), perhaps give you the opportunity to help someone out if you have the time or the inclination, and can give you fodder for conversation the next time you see them. I also love when people have a picture of themselves in their profile, specifically their face, because it gives me that extra feeling of connection: I see your face, I read what you’re up to. All the better if it’s something interesting. But even if it’s not, it doesn’t take me more than a couple of seconds to scan through 140 characters.
But definitely the lesson I learned from the last time I tried Twitter is to be selective about who you follow. Follow friends, follow people you admire, and people you find interesting or smart. But don’t hesitate to un-follow. If their tweets are nothing but interruptions, with things you don’t care about, ax ‘em. I’ve heard many smart entrepreneurs this month, first at RISE Austin and then at SXSW. Many of them said that a mistake they made in their business was being too quick to hire and too slow to fire. I think that’s a great principle to apply to Twitter.
Ok, so enough about following friends. Here’s another reason why Twitter saves time. There is a lot to learn in this world, about the things I’m interested in. Reading blogs, reading books, surfing the net…it all takes time. A shortcut is to follow the people I think are the smartest about the things I’m interested in. It gives me quick snippets of information, and if I’m directed to a link, I’m reasonably certain it’s going to be pretty good. I don’t have to sort through all the data myself, looking for the interesting stuff. For example, I’m into productivity and politics. There is more information on just these two topics than I can consume in 100 lifetimes. But by following a few people, I can get caught up in about one page of tweets, at only 140 characters each. Takes me about 60 seconds to scan.
The next thing I learned I was doing wrong the first time I tried Twitter was that I set it up to receive tweets on my cell phone. BIG mistake. This will drive you batty, immediately. This time around I know that you should use a Twitter client on your iPhone or on your computer desktop. Personally I’m enjoying Twitter as a desktop app using Fluid. (UPDATE: Fluid inexplicably stopped working. I’m now experimenting with both PeopleBrowsr and TweetDeck). And I saw many, many people using Tweetdeck at SXSW. If you are following a lot of people, that’s the way to go, because it allows you to sort and group. And I like Twitterific on my iPhone. (UPDATE: I’ve switched to Tweetie but Twitterific is free so I’d suggest you try that first.)
So just like any tool, especially technology, once you decide to use it, you need to learn how to CONTROL it, rather than let IT control YOU. This is true for email, your Blackberry, your iPhone, Facebook, LinkedIn…and it’s no different for Twitter. Don’t leave the clients open all the time, check them only when YOU decide it’s a good time to receive them. Still, it’s tempting to check them all the time, just like email. But if you allow these technologies to control your life like that, pretty soon it’s like you’re being carried away by the rapids, without a boat or a paddle. The key to productivity is staying in control. Just like in the “old days,” my grandmother would say, “just because the phone rings, doesn’t mean you have to answer it!”
BTW, if you’re interested, you can follow me on Twitter @mnthomas.