Of the many bulk email lists that arrive in my inbox each day, one of my new favorites is Help A Reporter Out, run by Peter Shankman. It’s an great list not just because of its usefulness, but also because of Peter’s witty introductions.

I was struck the other day when Peter wrote about a topic close to my heart - and close to my waist. The BlackBerry.

Everyone says that BlackBerrys are the perfect thing for people with ADD. I realize that it’s the opposite. Killing 30 minutes before a meeting, I email a friend who works at Scholastic, because I’m close to her building. “Hey, a block away. Got time for coffee?” I hit send. Blackberry then takes like, 10 minutes to do a pull-check on email, when I get her response, “sure, sounds good!” It’s been TEN MINUTES. I have NO IDEA what sounds good - I’ve walked half a mile and am probably shopping or petting a Poodle or something.

As someone who normally has 1,000,000 things going through my head at any given moment, the BlackBerry is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing, in that it allows me to instantly gather data and reach out to the people who are relevant to whatever path my brain is taking at the moment. And a curse because having access to so much information can become a major distraction.

I’ve carried some form of mobile email device for the last decade or so. (Mostly BlackBerrys, with an occasional Treo or Windows Mobile device thrown in. I suppose that one day I will join the cool kids and get an iPhone.) During this period, I’ve picked up a couple of tricks that help keep the information overload to a manageable level. I have an incredibly strict filtering system that results in less than 1% of my email actually making it to the BlackBerry. I use different profiles for different times of the day, so that I never get woken up unless it is an actual emergency. And, most recently, I’ve picked up some of the tricks from Mark Hurst’s book “Bit Literacy“.

Mark is one of the founders of Creative Good, a customer experience consultancy in New York. Mark also runs the GEL conferences, goodexperience.com, and the Creative Good Councils (to which I currently belong.)

The book is all about letting the various “bits” go. That starts with using the OEM (Open, engage, move) method at least once a day to reset your inbox to zero. This deceptively simple step significantly reduced the number of open loops I have going on at any one time, helping to avoid “sure, sounds good” incidents like Peter describes.

Another topic that this books covers is narrowing down your media streams. For me, that meant using tools like techmeme, feedburner and friendfeed to aggregate my inputs. It also meant unsubscribing from about 100 “industry newsletters” that I never read, and only keeping the good ones (like HARO and Good Experience.)

And finally, the book helped me learn to be ok with using my inbox as an inbox, and not a to-do list or rolodex.

I’m curious - what tricks does everyone else use to organize the bits in your life?

Yesterday morning, an armadillo managed to get itself stuck underneath our deck. Now, normally, this would not have been a problem, except that:

1. Our dog, Jack, stays outside during the day because otherwise he would destroy our house.
2. Jack was freaking out at the armadillo
3. The armadillo was too scared to move because there was a 70 pound labrador barking at it
4. The armadillo was too far under the deck for me to get to

We quickly figured out that the only way for this situation to resolve itself was to just leave the armadillo alone, hoping that once Jack wasn’t around, it would extricate itself. Of course, that meant that Jack had to stay inside, which meant that I had to work from my home office so that I could keep an eye on him.

This, of course, resulted in a hilarious email to my boss in which I had to explain that I wouldn’t be in the office on account of an armadillo.

Only in Texas …

When I first created this blog, it was my primary outlet for communicating online. However, several years later, I found that I was spending less and less time updating this blog, and more time creating content via other online channels (i.e. twitter, linkedin, etc.)

So, I’ve updated this blog to reflect that. On the right hand side, you will see two new features. The first is a section entitled “Where to Find Me Online”. In this section, you will see a list of online services that I use, along with a link to my profile so that we can connect!

The other new section is entitled “My Lifestream”. This section contains an aggregated feed of all of my activity on the various social networks that I use. Pretty cool, huh?