Over the past two years, I have had the good fortune to get to know Bert Decker. He is an amazing person with an incredible background. If you haven’t heard of him before, Bert Decker is a national communications expert, best selling author and entrepreneur. He founded the 100 person communications training company Decker Communications, Inc. He has been featured in the NY Times, Business Week, and on 20/20, as well as being the communications commentator for the NBC TODAY Show for the Presidential Debates. He has been a communications coach to Charles Schwab, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former Mattel CEO’s John Ammerman and Jill Barrad, Olympians Bonnie Blair and Tom Dolan, SF 49er All-Pro Brent Jones, and dozens of other executives And he is the best selling author of “You’ve Got to Be Believed To Be Heard” and “Speaking With Bold Assurance“. Bert graciously agreed to do a ten question interview with me and here are his insights on a wide range of topics.

(1) In your book “You’ve Got to Be Believed to Be Heard” you refer to “The New Communicators”. Can you explain what a new communicator is? Can you give an example of your favorite New Communicator?

New communicators connect with EVERY audience – no matter the setting – in:

• behavior

• content

• interaction

In our Decker Method courses we call it the messenger, the message and the medium – they all are one. A new communicator creates a communication experience that is energized and action oriented.

Three great New Communicators are Steve Jobs (business world), Guy Kawasaki (tech/author world) and Bono (celebrity world.)

(2) So, that covers the good communicators. Who would say is having the most trouble these days as a communicator and why?

• Richard Fuld, Lehman Brothers CEO – closed, arrogant and aloof when he testified to Congress.

• Caroline Kennedy – she lost her bid for the NY Senate seat with a monotone, halting delivery, unfocused message and a mess of ‘ums’ and ‘ahs.’

• Timothy Geithner – stiff and cold. He is not a good messenger for this very important and controversial message.

(3) There has been so much said about Barack Obama’s oratory skills in the past year. Would you consider Barack Obama to be a New Communicator?

No, he’s a good orator, not a great communicator. I’ve reviewed him often (check out Bert’s review here) and it’s fascinating – Obama is President largely because of his 2004 Convention speech, but he STILL does not use the teleprompter well (here’s Bert’s detailed take on Obama’s use of the teleprompter) And when not speechifying, he usually communicates in a professorial manner, with a halting cadence, and also many ums and ahs. Occasionally he is energetic and open and light – but rarely. So ironically, the one who became President because of communication (read oratorical) skills needs to increase his connecting skills.

(4) If you could give one bit of advice to Mr. Obama, what would it be?

• Learn to use the teleprompter so it’s not a ping-pong match – 4 seconds to one side and 4 seconds to the other.

• Leave pauses instead of filling space with non-words.

• Vary rhythm and pacing of voice – energize not professorialize.

(5) You have become a fixture on Twitter in the past year (BTW, I love your Tweets). How do you see the rise of social media tools like Twitter and Facebook impacting communications over the next few years?

I see Twitter (not Facebook) as the dominant communication tool for both text and speaking. It’s a powerful business/personal communication medium in it’s current form as text only, and will become EXPLOSIVE with the right app (the new Nambu is promising – that’s the direction it will be going.) But it will change the face of the speaking environment.

(6) Do you believe there is going to be a new breed of new New Communicators who will use social media tools to connect with people?

Yes and no. First the no – the majority of people will use the text only email/Linked-in/Twitter etc as text only – will not incorporate it holistically.

And yes, the New Communicator will embrace the social media tools (Twitter mostly) in ALL of their communicating environments – but they will be smart about it, and understand there is a difference in text, voice and in person communications – learn the differences and use them intentionally. Most people communicate at the unconscious level – our goal is to make it conscious.

(7) It seems that a big buzz these days is about the use of Twitter at conferences and presentations. What are your thoughts on the rising use of Twitter during presentations?

Twitter is going to be very powerful in expanding (or disrupting) the conference and formal speaking environment. I blogged on that here – but more is yet to come. Big business (most of our clients) are not used to using Twitter in meetings and speeches, but no longer can anyone say ‘laptops down.’ People will Twitter whether you like it or not, so you have to incorporate that in your ‘experience’ and be intentional. Those who become good at it can enhance and expand their speaking – but it will be a rocky road for awhile. Those who use it well will succeed mightily.

(8) You attended SXSW in Austin, TX earlier this year. What were the top insights you gained at SXSW this year?

One of the most amazing conferences I’ve attended (out of thousands!) SXSW Interactive was peak energy, peak connections and peak engagement. 30 meetings going on at a time, 50-75% of people in most meetings/speeches were tweeting on laptops or cells. Podcasts and audios, twitpics and Flip videos and of course tweets were going out to the world by the thousands every minute. More and more conferences will become more like this.

Again, New Communicators must have not only the messenger and the message at peak performance, but also the medium.

Critical point though, that almost ALL neglect is getting video feedback and seeing themselves – so many at SXSW have distracting and nervous habits that it doesn’t matter how good their content or medium use is – they get in their own way. Observed behavior changes. The smart New Communicators at SXSW and all conferences will get themselves on video!

(9) What blogs are you reading most these days and why?

• Well, this one: EdgeHopper - Always well written and lengthy posts on relevant communication subjects – interactive media and personal behavior.

• Presentation Zen - Garr Reynolds is the leader (along with Nancy Duarte) of slide design and communications quality. His posts are in depth, and insightful.

• Seth Godin’s Blog – At first I didn’t like Seth’s text only posts, but then they grew on me for two reasons. They are short and pithy. 80% of them are original and thought provoking. (Pareto’s Law comes into play.)

(10) Who are your favorite follows on Twitter and why?

@ed – a very unusual man of integrity, insight and influence that I have gotten to know well on Twitter.

@OliviaMitchell – great communication research, tips and blog.

@Mashable – always good, up to date links and info on Twitter and the tech world.

But it’s a very tough question because there are so many Twitterers AND blogs that are good. [Chris' note: If you want to follow Bert on Twitter, and I highly recommend it, he's @BertDecker]

Related posts:

1. Bert Decker: You’ve Got to Be Believed to Be Heard
2. Did we forget how to talk to each other?
3. Learning to Speak
4. Distributed communications mediums
5. Social Media and Your Business

Let me just say that I love crowdsourcing and crowdsourced projects. With all the things that are being crowdsourced today, one of the most interesting is the trend toward crowdsourcing journalism. On the forefront of this effort is HARO….or Help A Reporter Out. HARO is the brainchild of Peter Shankman, an entrepreneur and the CEO of The Geek Factory, a PR and Marketing boutique firm in New York City. Essentially HARO connects journalists who have questions or queries for their stories with YOU. It’s such a simple but amazing way to connect journalists with the widest possible selection of sources available to them. They ask a question…you answer it. As I said, I absolutely love crowdsourcing and I think that HARO has hit it out of the park with this one. As for rules, HARO has just this simple advice (and you might apply this in other areas of your life/business as well):

“Just promise me and yourself that you’ll ask yourself before you send a response: Is this response really on target? Is this response really going to help the journalist, or is this just a BS way for me to get my client in front of the reporter? If you have to think for more than three seconds, chances are, you shouldn’t send the response.”

That’s it. It’s simple, it’s effective and it requires very little effort…oh yeah, and did I mention it’s FREE. That’s what makes crowdsourcing work the best! Four letters: F-R-E-E.

Here’s how it works: After you register on HARO’s website, you receive a simple email a few times a day with questions and queries from legitimate reporters around the globe (totally not spammy either). If you are really able to answer the questions or are a qualified expert in an area of need, you can become a real source for the reporter. Today, there are 30,000 journalists who have used HARO, sending out more than 3000 queries per month to over 80,000 members. That’s a great network and a tremendous crowd to source from.

Right now, the emails contain queries for all sorts of categories. But, future plans are for additional break-outs with specific HARO notices for specific industry verticals.

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5. Private: The Fastest Brand Man on Twitter

You’ve been there before.  You’re speaking at a conference and you scan the audience.  You see the flood of laptops, iPhones, and Blackberries in the audience furiously Tweeting away or using some conference IRC back channel to chat about YOUR presentation.  Instead of ignoring it or asking your audience to turn off their electronics, this week’s guest blogger Olivia Mitchell has some great advice on how use Twitter and your Tweeting audience to your advantage. In this post, Olivia gives us seven compelling ways to use Twitter to engage your audience. Thanks Olivia.

GUEST POST FROM OLIVIA MITCHELL:

Audience engagement and participation is a common goal for presenters. But participation in particular can be hard to get by traditional means. People enjoy the comfort zone of being passive in the audience and often need significant prodding to do anything.

But now we have a new tool to get engagement – that’s Twitter. Many presenters are scared of presenting while people are twittering. But as Dean Shareski says:

The more I’m allowed to interact and play with the content the more engaged and ultimately the more learning happens.

Twitter makes it easy to engage. There’s not the risk of humiliation which is always present when you say something out loud. And if there’s a power heirarchy in the room, it gets flattened somewhat – everybody has 140 characters to have their say.

So rather than seeing the Twitter back channel as an intimidating third force in your presentation, embrace it.

Later this month, I’m going to be presenting remotely from New Zealand at PresentationCamp in San Francisco. I’m going to experiment with using Twitter as a channel to get active participation from my audience.

Here’s a variety of ways that you could use Twitter to engage your audience.

1. Introductions

If you would normally get people in your audience to introduce themselves, why not do it via twitter. Many people dread the round-robin introduction – doing it on twitter is quicker and less onerous.

2. Poll your audience

If you haven’t been able to find out about your audience before the presentation (which I do recommend), then ask a question and get them to respond on Twitter. In the past, I’ve seen presenters ask their audience what they want to get out of the presentation by going round the room and writing it up on a flipchart or whiteboard. This can get tedious. Ask out-loud, but get the responses on twitter. Ta-da. Instant recorded feedback.

3. Encourage questions through twitter

Instead of waiting till the end for questions, encourage people to tweet their questions as soon as they occur to them.

4. Active engagement with the substance of your presentation

My session at PresentationCamp is on developing the core message of a presentation. My plan is to have people tweet their core messages (which conveniently should be under 140 characters long) as they develop them through the session. How could you get your audience engaging, rather than just listening, with the substance of your presentation?

5. Encourage audience members to add their own ideas to yours

The best presentations are the ones that spark insights and ideas for your audience. Encourage them to tweet these ideas.

6. Get input and feedback from your audience

Consultation-type meetings have always been tricky. I’ve used flipcharts, post-it notes, forms for people to fill in. With a twitter-enabled audience, all that paraphernalia will be a thing of the past.

7. Gather evaluations

Presenters have already realised that twitter is a great way to get real-time evaluations by reviewing the stream of tweets that happened while you were presenting.

Paul Gillin Having recently waited six months to get audience evaluations from one presentation, I can tell you that the immediacy of the tweeted feedback was wonderful.

So make it official – at the end of your presentation – ask your audience to tweet their evaluation of the presentation.

Practical stuff

To create a stream of tweets just for your presentation, you’ll need to create a special hashtag for your presentation and then use an application that tracks just those tags (hashtags.org, spy, eventtrack, twitter search).

You may also want to display the tweet stream on a screen so that everyone – including you – can easily see it. If you want the stream to be on display all the time, you’ll need a second laptop, datashow and screen. But you could also display the stream at certain breaks in your presentation, in which case a second laptop plugged into the datashow will do fine.

Your thoughts

Have you used Twitter to engage your audience? What ideas do you have for how it could be used?

About Olivia Mitchell

Olivia Mitchell is a presentation trainer and blogger from New Zealand.  Olivia blogs at Speaking about Presenting. Visit her blog for more tips on how to prepare and deliver an engaging presentation.

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When it comes to organizations and team work, nothing is more important to success than communication. If your organization or team is is striving for continuous improvement, it’s imperative that really rich communication occurs between all team members, from top to bottom and everywhere in between. So why, if this is such an important practice for the success of organizations, do most of us choose to put some of the most important impediments to our success into emails or Wikis? Sure, we transfer the information that something is wrong and needs to be corrected. But that’s all we do, transfer information. Emails, Tweets, Wikis, and SharePoint don’t help us move others to action. Action, not information, is what moves us toward continuous improvement and success. And nothing moves people to action more than the spoken word.

I’ve been reading Bert Decker’s book You’ve Got to be Believed to Be Heard. It’s a fabulous book, and if you haven’t read it yet, you should. In his book, Bert asserts that the written word is the information channel and speaking is the action channel. According to Bert:

Speaking is like a multichannel Surround Sound experience, in which dozens of channels simultaneously feed information to the human mind. These various channels communicate a richly textured, multilayered message from speaker to listener. These channels consist of :

• Posture
• Facial expression
• Energy level
• Eye communication
• Vocal inflection
• Vocal intonation
• Volume
• Gestures and other physical actions
• And more

All of these non-verbal cues help transfer not just the information of the narrative, but the emotion and urgency of the message. They do so more effectively than any number of !!!‘s or URGENT‘s in an email can ever do. And it’s this emotion, this passion, this energy of verbal communication that motivates and persuades others to action. When you come to understand this basic premise, you then understand why communication, VERBAL communication, is essential to the success and improvement of any organization. Success and improvement require action, not just information. It requires that people in the organization are motivated to action to do the things that need to be done to improve the organization and their products.

I’ve written about the different levels of richness associated with different communication mediums, and I’ve also provided a list of tools to help distributed teams communicate more effectively, and I hope they’ve helped. But, please don’t misconstrue the message about the use of these tools for communications. Tools are good second alternatives for transferring information. But, when you need to transfer emotion and move people to action, don’t rely on tools for communication. Remember how to talk to each other and remember that face-to-face communication is the real power behind the most successful organizations and teams. So, the next time you find an impediment that needs to be removed for your team to be more effective, don’t send an email to your manager about the problem. Walk into his or her office and use your verbal skills to persuade him or her that something needs to be done, now. Move him or her to action today!!!

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Although the world around it is moving ahead at breakneck speeds, Kiel (and other towns just like it) is a living anachronism. My father in-law still uses a dial up modem connected at 54 kbps to find things on “those interwebs”. There is a 48-inch LCD flat panel television in his living room with rabbit ears attached to it. Yes, no cable, no satellite. I’ve been wondering who all of those digital television transition commercials were talking to and now I know. In my in-law’s home you hear statements like “This wind energy is just a temporary thing” (I’m not sure if they mean we’ll run out of wind or if wind energy is just a fad). To me, Kiel seems like a town straight out of Bill Bryson’s “The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-town America“.

So, why am I telling you so much about Kiel and my in-laws? It’s not because I’m a big city snob. In fact, I kind of like the peacefulness and slower pace of life in small towns. And I like my in-laws. I’m telling you about Kiel and my in-laws because sometimes when we’re developing software or products we forget that places like Kiel and people like my in-laws still exist. They don’t read the latest blog posts every morning on their iPhones. They read the local newspaper while eating breakfast in a small diner while they drink black coffee (not Starbuck’s). They don’t check to see how many new friends they have on FaceBook. They say good morning to the same friends they’ve had for the last 20 years at that diner. Chris Brogan recently wrote a post about social media and people in the “real world” that really puts this dilemma into perspective. The point is, if I walked into one of those bars on Fremont Street or the diner in downtown Kiel and said “I write a really popular blog”, most people would probably think, “That’s nice”, and that would be the end of that conversation.

My guess is, most of the people in Kiel don’t have a blog, don’t use Twitter, and don’t have a LinkedIn profile. Most people in Kiel (and most other places for that matter) aren’t techies like “us”. So why do we keep developing applications and products for people like “us”? I think that if we want to make a bigger, more remarkable impact, we need to help bridge the gap to the folks in the bars and diners on Fremont Street. And we need to understand that they aren’t moving at the same speed as “we” are. They’re not the early adopters on the technology adoption curve. They’re the conservative herd. They don’t want bells and whistles. They want an easy-button. So, when you start to design your next product or write your next application, think of the good folks in Kiel, and build something they’d use.

To see more pictures of Kiel, check out my Kiel photo set on Flickr.

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Ronica Roth, one of my colleagues here at Rally, recently suggested that our team try using Second Life to provide our team with a sense of collocation. Our team has several “remote” team members, and those that are “collocated” are frequently on travel. We rarely get to see each other in person. So, I find the idea of using Second Life for virtual meetings and collaboration intriguing. From the looks of it, we’ll probably give it a try and see how it works. I’ll keep you posted on our successes and/or failures with Second Life.

Ronica’s suggestion got me thinking back to a post I wanted to write some time ago on tools for distributed teams. One of the main challenges a distributed team faces is a barrier to good, collaborative communications. But, there are many tools and technologies that bring the level of collaboration between distributed team members to a higher level. Although these may never be as rich as face-to-face communications, I do believe they can help distributed teams perform better.

I’ve already written about how you can use Twitter to increase your productivity and there are tips in that post about how distributed teams can use Twitter to stay up to date on progress and tasking. In addition to Twitter, here is a brief list of other tools that I think distributed teams can communicate better:

• Adobe Connect: A really good web conferencing and eLearning platform
• Wikis: One of the best ways to share information amongst team members. There are tons of free ones out there that are easy to use. One I really like is PBWiki.
• SharePoint: Yes I know, it’s Microsoft, but it works pretty well and makes sharing of information very easy.
• Rally ALM: Not to be a fanboy, but Rally is really good for project management, planning, and tasking for distributed teams (disclaimer: I work for Rally, but I was a user before I worked for them)
• CardMeeting: A collaborative meeting space with virtual sticky notes. Great space for distributed brainstorming
• Windows SkyDrive: Again, yes Microsoft, but a good file sharing platform.
• Weave the People: Customized, private and focused networks enable conversations to be centered around what is important to your team. Check out a demo here.
• CrossLoop: Another good web conferencing and collaboration platform
• BaseCamp: Shared to-do lists, project plans and files
• Skype, and Babble: “Free” VOIP services
• QNext: Free audio, video and document sharing
• Convoq: Video, audio, screen sharing, presentation, IM,presence
• And of course the ubiquitous Webex…hopefully no description needed for this one

This is by no means a comprehensive list, but it’s a good starting point. If you have other tools or technologies that you use for distributed collaboration, let us know Sharing is always good.

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1. Webinar: Making Distributed Software Development Work
2. Sticky Minds Distributed Teams Webinar
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• 60% of those surveyed interact with companies using social media

Of those 60%:

• 93% say a company should have a presence in social media
• 85% say a company should not only be present but also interact with its customers via social media
• 56% say they feel a stronger connection with and better served by companies when they can interact with them in a social media environment
• 43% say companies should use social networks to solve customers’ problems
• 41% say companies should use social media to solicit feedback about products and services

Now, granted, this is an online survey, so the results may be a bit skewed. There is probably still a large population out there who have no idea what Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn even is (much less participate in online surveys). In fact, here’s a great post from Chris Brogan about keeping it real with real people (who aren’t geeks like us). But for those of your customers who are connected, you can’t afford to ignore the numbers uncovered by Cone in their study.

And, if you’re looking to start using social media in your marketing and PR efforts, HubSpot has a free webinar this week on How to Use Twitter for Marketing and PR. Here are the details:

Date: Friday, October 10, 2008

Time: 2PM EDT (GMT-4)

Duration: 1 Hour

Register here

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srdny76 I just learned I was steps away from a vegan ice cream parlor yesterday! Yay! There’s a vegan ice cream parlor!

caseypatton ate some sweet, sweet moe’s bbq tonight.

CheesecakeBree Tired… but I have a few things I need to do before bed. (It’s not late enough for me to fall asleep anyway.)

girliegeek if your friends won’t tell ya you got spinach in your teeth, WHO WILL?

Truly scintillating, I know.  But, I’m trying to figure out how useful Twitter can be beyond reporting the mundane details of your life for all the world to see.  At first I thought, maybe this is a good replacement for instant messaging.  You can type something in and instantly message, well…everyone else on Twitter (or at least those who want to follow your life).  Is this effective communication?  Not sure.  Maybe, just maybe Twitter can be put to good use after all.  Good meaning: productive, useful, not wasting your time, not tying you to technology when you can be doing something else with your time (work or dare I say, even fun stuff like going outdoors!).  Here’s my list of potentially good uses for Twitter:

1. Emergency response: People can use the relatively low bandwidth messaging of Twitter to send messages to entire response teams instantaneously.  No mixed messages.  No dropped calls. Everyone on the team gets the Tweets (it’s what Twitter posts are called).  Very effective, and they can be tagged with locations as well.
2. Conference back-channels: OK, so maybe not super productive, but if you’re at a conference, you can provide live commentary about the speakers, their lame PowerPoints, their incorrect statements, bad haircuts…you name it.  Not only are you sharing with other conference attendees, you’re sharing your commentary on the conference with others who may not have been able to attend.  Plus, it’s great for adding some fun and excitement during really bad PowerPoints (it worked really well at Where 2.0 recently).
3. Task tracking: OK, not exciting, but useful…use it track your daily work tasks.  “Started working on foo functionality”…”Finished working on foo functionality”. Boring to the world, useful to you.  Plus, if you’re team is all following, it provides instant status updates on your tasks…and you thought daily stand ups gave good visibility into task status!!!
4. IN/OUT of office: OK, another not real sexy use, but it’s good for in/out of office status with location info.  Especially good when you’re on the road.
5. Promoting you blog posts: Slightly self serving, but effective.  You can let people know when you have a new blog post up.  Hopefully, you’re blog is compelling enough to have established a good subscriber base and you don’t need to resort to this tactic…but worth a try if you’re trying to build your blog base.  Probably good for directing traffic to a website too. I’ll test this out and let you know how many people visit this blog and our website after posting the addresses on Twitter.
6. News Reader: Some online news sources now issue Tweets.  Good for those people who like their news items short and sweet…can you say Short Attention Span Theater? Check out CNN, BBC and many others.
7. Quick feedback: On project teams, use it to do voting.  Post an idea and ask your followers or team members to vote on it or comment on it.  Really good for geographically dispersed teams.
8. Live coverage: For real time events or for folks who do field work, provide live coverage of what’s going on to your followers (OK, a lot like #2, but I’m trying to get to 10 here to make this whole argument worthwhile).
9. Release/Build notifications: Notify team members or customers/clients of current software releases or builds.
10. Job candidate backgrounds: Alright, this one may be borderline, but if someone is interviewing with you for a job, check to see if they Twitter.  If they do, check their Twitter feed to find out a little bit more about them.  You may not want to know that they are part of the Society for Creative Anachronism…but hey, it could be useful.

Whew, made it to 10…didn’t think I’d get there.  I’m sure there are plenty of other good uses for Twitter and I’d like to hear them if you have some ideas.  Hopefully, Twitter works out better than instant messaging.  When I think about IM’ing, I think about people taking longer to say less (just pick up the phone and talk to me).  I think Twitter is potentially more useful than IM but we’ll have to see where it all goes.  However, if I have to constantly wade through Tweets like these:

PhilippaJane trim milk hot chocolate and marshmellows- helps me through today

I might be more inclined to spend my time checking out I Can Has Cheezburger…it’s much more entertaining.  BTW, if you want to follow me on Twitter, check me out at http://twitter.com/ChrisSpagnuolo…but I’m not promising anything!!!

more cat pictures

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“You must always work not just within but below your means. If you can handle three elements, handle only two. If you can handle ten, then handle five. In that way the ones you do handle, you handle with more ease, more mastery and you create a feeling of strength in reserve.”

This is a really interesting quote in light of some of the reading I’ve been doing lately on multi-tasking, context switching and work interruptions.  Multi-tasking, context-switching and interruptions can be the biggest killers to the effectiveness and efficiency of agile teams.  According to David E. Mayer, who is a cognitive scientist and director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan, “Multitasking is going to slow you down, increasing the chances of mistakes.  Disruptions and interruptions are a bad deal from the standpoint of our ability to process information.”

Unfortunately for most of us in the software development world (and the “new” world at large), we have a plethora of technology at our disposal that we heavily rely upon to “manage” our multi-tasked lives.  We firmly believe that Outlook, our Blackberries, iPods, Instant Messaging, multiple monitors and other cool things will help us get through our days more effectively.  The truth is, they don’t.  They provide too many distractions from what we get paid to do…develop software.

A recent context switching study conducted by Microsoft Research and the University of Illinois examined diaries of the daily tasks performed by a variety of users.  What they found was that 45% of the reported tasks in the diaries were project-related or routine tasks that were part of the users jobs.  That figure would be astounding on its own, but when considered along with the tasks that comprise the other 55%, you’ll really be amazed.  23% of the daily tasks were related to e-mail and 13% were related to tracking their multiple tasks.  That’s 36% of time spent managing email and tasks!  The remainder of the tasks were pretty evenly split between phone calls (8%), meetings (6%), and personal time (5%).

I have personally fallen prey to this same pattern, especially with regard to emails.  I’ve tried several solutions to the issue including e-mail free Fridays, closing Outlook, disabling my IM client, turning off my cell phone, etc.  They’ve all been somewhat effective in creating more focus on my work.  However, the most effective solution I have found to my email “problem” came from Tim Ferriss’ book The 4-Hour Work Week.  It’s very simple.  Check your email twice a day.  I check mine at around noon and 4:00 (I don’t check it first thing in the morning).  If you’re going to do this, set up an email auto-response in your email client that says something like mine does (thanks to Tim for the “template”):

“Due to my high current workload, I am checking and responding to my e-mails twice a day at 12:00 P.M. MST and 4:00 MST.  If you have an urgent request that cannot wait until those times, please call me on my office phone at (123) 987-6543. Thank you for understanding this move to more efficiency and effectiveness.  It helps me accomplish more to serve you better.”

It sounds a bit extreme, and I received more than my share of concerned comments when I first implemented my lean e-mail diet plan, but over time it worked.  You may not be able to use this idea, but the general advice I’m trying to get out there is, don’t rely on technology to manage your multi-tasking.  It never works.  Instead, focus on managing those technologies so that they don’t interfere with your effectiveness and efficiency.

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