The question. When you don’t have a Blackberry and your life is work, your work life revolves around your need for one. The pile of emails in the morning waiting to be answered. The realization that time management on a calender other than your work one is absolutely impossible. Ahhh… if only you had a Blackberry to manage your life.
You are now having 1 of 3 reactions (if you get another, let me know):
-
Amen! Hook me up ASAP!
-
You can have mine.
-
Those things are cool. It would be really handy to text message with that many keys.
For those of you who understand my stress, this is the great debate. Blackberries: Productive or Anti-Productive? As a non-user on the brink of becoming a user, I would like to voice my stance so that a month or two down the road I can reflect on the organizational strategies behind staying sane as a Blackberry user.
As a Pro-Productivity non-user, my Blackberry-loving philosophies are as follows:
-
Calender Centralization: OK, let’s face it. There are 168 hours in a 7-day week. 56 are spent sleeping if you’re 70 or older, live in a city, or else extremely energetic. Otherwise, if you’re like me, you’re looking at more like 70 hours/week dedicated to sleep. Now I’m down to roughly 100 hours of active time. I’m going to say that 46 hours/week are spent doing work-related activities. At least. A mobile management system is almost essential in transitioning daily between work and the 3 hours of life I get before bedtime. That 6:00 doctor’s appointment? No longer forgotton in the post-work relief mode. It’s there, on my Blackberry, with all of my meetings, telling me to get checked up.
-
Work-related “panic”: Instead of feeling pressured to check my work email at night and on the weekend to see if anything went wrong or I have important messages, a Blackberry gives me the freedom to log on only when it’s necessary. Ahhhhh…
Two major things that I anticipate from my newfound technology, but both are very meaningful and a large part of my daily routines. Do I acknowledge and anticipate the time-management challenges that will come with the technology itself? Absolutely. And I look forward to facing every challenge with an organizational challenge of my own. I hereby dedicate myself to harnessing that inner workaholic perfectionist addict-in-waiting and always let my productive persona conquer.
We’ll see… 
-JV
