A perk of office
I got my first Blackberry last week, and spent the weekend trying to find a bridge off of which to hurl it with great fury. It was a bad idea, I realized, to get emails from my superiors at 7am on a Saturday or 7pm on a Sunday, when they are wont to send them. I have met many a person who says they wish they could get rid of theirs and their addiction to it, but cannot. Alas, President-Elect Obama is addicted to his, too. But his new status may preclude that. Because he’ll probably have to give it up.
[B]efore he arrives at the White House, he will probably be forced to sign off. In addition to concerns about e-mail security, he faces the Presidential Records Act, which puts his correspondence in the official record and ultimately up for public review, and the threat of subpoenas. A decision has not been made on whether he could become the first e-mailing president, but aides said that seemed doubtful.
I’ve worked for executives who are important (and busy) enough that they don’t even use a computer. They have people type their emails, answer their emails, that kind of thing. How nice it would be.














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back to top6 Comments to “A perk of office”
I’m due to have one issued to me. I do dread it. I have my own cell phone and I’d rather just use it instead of one issued by the govt for which I’d have to be accountable.
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Ask not what your Blackberry can do for you, but for what you can do for your Blackberry.
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Do your wife a favor and turn it off at night. It drives me crazy to hear that hum at 5 in the morning when the IT people start sending my husband reports . . .
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Obam’s addiction to his crackberry is the least of our worries.
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Harrison, just remember: you may be getting emails, but this is the time when you set precedent for how you respond (and IF you respond) over the weekend. If you clearly communicate (either by explicitly indicating via a reply like “I’ll get back to by end of day on Monday about that,” or by simply responding on Monday and ignoring the email over the weekend) then the boundary lines are drawn. Even the most demanding colleagues will get used to dealing with that over time.
If you do not clearly respond, you’re dead meat from here on out, and people will quickly come to think of you as someone who will (and should, and must) email them back within hours, regardless of the day of the week or time of day. Take it from me (I’m a consultant at a firm full of workaholics who regularly gets emails on the weekend asking for or implying that I should do work): if you set your boundaries now you’ll do fine. If not, you’re at their mercy.
The good part about having a Blackberry is that if you are expecting urgent emails, you don’t have to be sitting by your computer connected to the office network to wait for them, and can read and respond anytime, from anywhere, if it really is urgent. The bad part is that people think that means you should respond immediately. They just need to learn that the world won’t stop if they have to wait until Monday noon. =)
Good luck!
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I’ve had a Blackberry.
I wouldn’t trade my Iphone for one even if someone paid me.
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