Check­ing Email in the Office is a Daily Routine

Tak­ing your coat off and put­ting the kettle on aside; what are the ini­tial things you start to do when you first boot up your com­puter on a morning?

For most of us I sus­pect the first thing we take a look at is our email when we start to trawl through the morning’s In box. How­ever for some of us and I include myself in this, there’s an addi­tional and increas­ing level of com­pet­i­tion for our atten­tion first thing in the morn­ing thanks to social media web­sites. The need to mon­itor this inform­a­tion is per­haps a form of “bor­der patrol” which if you think about it, is akin to cat or a dog patrolling it’s territory.

Bor­der Patrol

In our house­hold we have two cats and a dog who may be used as an ana­logy to illus­trate this idea.

Cats in par­tic­u­lar are creatures of habit and routinely per­form the tasks of; sleep, eat, more sleep, poop, even more sleep and a spot of patrolling; before repeat­ing the cycle infinite!.The dog isn’t much dif­fer­ent, with per­haps more emphasis on the ‘eat­ing’ and the ‘poop­ing’ and less of the patrolling — although that is still there.

Fel­low dog and cat own­ers will also recog­nize a sim­ilar pat­tern in their own pets par­tic­u­larly the need to patrol their ter­rit­ory bor­ders to mon­itor for intruders and those hid­den mes­sages that are more often than not, sprayed up the peri­pheral ver­tical sur­faces dot­ted around your local neighborhood.

For me; my daily ‘bor­der patrol’ includes mon­it­or­ing the vari­ous sources or chan­nels of inform­a­tion that are spread around my neigh­bor­hood: albeit ones I access via my PC screen (no spray­ing is involved):

• First of all there’s email. I mon­itor 3 email accounts daily using Microsoft Out­look™, or if I’m not at my office PC, web mail using Google Apps. That in itself can quite often be a job in itself.
• Then there’s my Google Reader account, through which I sub­scribe to numer­ous blogs. I like to catch up on the latest blog posts from my net­work before I get stuck into the day’s work.
• Mov­ing on; next there’s my Twit­ter accounts that I take a look at to see what my net­work has been tweet­ing about and what ‘men­tions’ I may have. Sim­il­arly I’ll take a look at my Face­book and LinkedIn accounts. If I feel there’s any­thing that needs respond­ing to imme­di­ately, I’ll do so at the same time.
• From these I’ll move on to the vari­ous web­sites that I man­age on behalf of my cli­ents and I’ll take a fleet­ing glance at the Google Ana­lyt­ics stat­ist­ics for each one. If any­thing “jumps out” at me I’ll invest­ig­ate further.
• Finally, if my blog (the one you’re read­ing now) has received any post com­ments I’ll then spend 5 minutes mod­er­at­ing those.
• I’ll then go back to review­ing the day’s emails.

Phew!

By this time of course it’s halfway to lunch­time, which makes you won­der how any of us with sim­ilar demands on our plates, actu­ally get any work done!

I’m of a suf­fi­cient age (makes me sound ancient doesn’t it?) that remem­bers the work-place without email, never mind social media. As such. hav­ing read all the above it makes you won­der what the hell we who are of a sim­ilar ilk, did all day!

Still, were we hap­pier weren’t we? Er..no!

Other Posts Sim­ilar To This One

• Are You Neg­lect­ing Tra­di­tional Mar­ket­ing in Favour of Social Media?
• Eng­land Out! York­shire For­ward Going and Bye Bye Busi­ness Link
• The Secret of Sales Suc­cess Revealed