sent from you blackberry?

About a year ago, I was sitting next to a business executive type on a plane back to DC.  As soon as we touched down, he brought out his blackberry and started feverishly tapping at it.  Someone asked him about the blackberry, and he confidently exclaimed that it’s made him 25% more productive, or some such.  So I said to myself,  Hold your horses, there, skippy!

Now, I don’t know the guy.  He may have data to support his claim. But let’s break this down. His grand claim means that in an average 10 hour workday, his blackberry allows him to reclaim 2.5 hours for other tasks.  What does he do on his blackberry that gives him that time back, that would be done less efficiently without the blackberry?  Email is a lot clunkier to type on a blackberry, so it can’t be it.  Most people claim that they can get rid of email quicker since they check it on a blackberry while not at the office, and act on it, freeing up on-computer time.  And it’s fair to assume that this guy may have a one-hour commute each way. Hopefully he has someone driving him around too, because I know none of us are so dangerous to reply to email on the blackberry while driving.  Then, there’s meetings.  You can of course check your email in the middle of a meeting.  Speaking of efficiency, if your meeting is so trivial that you use it to check your email on your blackberry, wouldn’t it be more productive to not have the meeting in the first place?  Or do you think your lunch buddy really enjoys watching you check your email?

I’ll tackle a few other points in a bit.  I, like many of us these days, look at efficiency and productivity as it relates to our full lives: our work, of course, but also our hobbies, our personal time, our family.  The blackberry and similar devices has, for better or worse, erased the work/personal lines that used to exist at 0900 and 1700 every day.  I check email at home, at the restaurant, while I volunteer…If I’m not efficient in these places, I’m not efficient at work either.  Spending 2 hours working at home after dinner does not mean I am 2 hours more efficient.

(more…)

OpenID

21 October 2008

As of 1400 EDT, AOL’s openID provider, openid.aol.com, is down.

For better or worse, I use openID.  For worse or better, I use aol.com.  The reason is simple: When I started checking out openID, AOL had an openID provider that gave every AIM account an openID account. (If you have an AIM account your openID URL is http://openid.aol.com/aimusername ).

Things have been peachy.  I have a single way to log in to many places, including all the 37Signals products, many blogs, Wikis, etc.

Except for today.  It seems my openID provider is down, as is presumably every other AOL openid account.  DNS does not resolve.  Which means now I can’t log into any of these sites. 

Well, that’s not entirely true.  I could bypass openID, wait for my non-openID account pasword to get emailed to me, etc.  But the bottom line is I can’t log in.  

This brings up some questions about relying on openID.  Admittedly, I’ve not had an issue with this so far.  However, it may be nice to have some work-around.  For now I’ll wait and see.  More as this develops.

Impact

In pure numbers, this potentially affects the more than 63 million AIM users, assuming they all use openID. If only 10% use this feature, that’s still over 6 million users. The frustrating thing here is that there is no “status” page or other way to find out the current status of the provider.

Federal Contractor Misconduct Database

Mandy at Project On For Government Oversight couldn’t wait to share on POGO’s blog about tomorrow’s official release, so neither could we.

“So we’ve been teasing you about the upcoming re-release and updating of POGO’s Federal Contractor Misconduct Database.  While we’re officially releasing it tomorrow, since the President just signed the FY 2009 Defense Authorization Act creating a government-wide (though not publicly available) database of information regarding the integrity and performance of federal contractors and grantees, we couldn’t help but share the fact that it’s AVAILABLE NOW.”

Tsk. Tsk.  Bad federal contractors!

This upgrade contains 50 more federal contractors that have gotten themselves into trouble.  In addition, there are some layout improvements and a new sort by Enforcement Agency feature.

So how much have the 100 had to pay for their bad deeds since 1995?

Grand Total of $23.6 Billion

Yes, thats 23… BILLION… with a B.

I came upon this article in the New York Times when doing research for a blog post.   I figured, what better way to introduce a new “productivity” category?  These are some astonishing figures:

the cost of unnecessary interruptions is $650 billion per year

This is mostly mundane matters, in large part dealing with email, IM, SMS, etc.  The majority of the cost is in the time it takes to get back to work

28% of a workday is spent in interruptions

For those familiar with Stephen Covey’s quadrant, this is in the “Not Important, Not Urgent” category.  Another 20% is spent in meetings (though whether these are important or ugent is not addressed), and part of 25% is spent writing “productive” emails.  This is almost 3 hours in a 10 hour workday.
On the email side, new terms are hitting the street such as “email apnea” (the condition of holding your breath when you realize you have 300 new emails), and “email bankruptcy” (where you have so many emails you have to delete your inbox and try again.)   Gmail recently added a “take a break” feature in Gmail, which locks you out of your mail for 15 minutes.

In light of this, I’ve decided to add a few more things to my list of email productivity.

(more…)