Living with My Head in the Cloud

Over the past couple year’s career changes have made me a much more mobile professional and as such I have become heavily reliant on my laptop, wireless, mobile internet, and Blackberry. I have also shifted my work, reading, and communications patterns over time to become more efficient and effective in my personal and professional communications.

Over the past couple months I have written a number or posts about my mobile workspace, how I integrate my laptop and Blackberry to provide a single information system, and how to work more effectively when on the road. One of the tools I use but have written little about is staring me right in the face…the internet.

As a laptop user I tend to carry most of my documents with my on the run but since the internet has become readily available to me I have started to make the shift for many of my daily communications tasks to the cloud and away from my CPU. Below are a couple examples of how I remain in touch and efficient with “my head in the clouds.”

• First and foremost I sync my Blackberry over-the-air (OTA) and though the clouds with Outlook, which I use as my desktop personal information manager (PIM). This keeps my calendar, contacts, task list, and work e-mail in check regardless of my locale. This allows me to remain active when most would be down because I know my next actions and have a way to remain in touch and reach out to my contacts. Of course the backbone of the wireless communication is the phones data services that ride over the internet.
• Over the past couple years I have moved my personal e-mail to the web, starting first with switching from POP to IMAP (which allowed me to keep my e-mail on the server and connect from multiple locations) and now I have settled on Gmail to provide me web based e-mail. I not only use a traditional @gmail.com address but also my personal domain on Gmail, which provides me access on my Blackberry (with their mobile applications) as well as my laptop or any other computer with an internet connection. Beyond their great spam and virus monitoring service I have the convenience global access anywhere I am.
• Over the years I have used fewer non-web sources for news and human interest and moved exclusively to the web, and in particular to RSS feeds. I receive not only local news but a daily stream of special interest and personal interest stories from trusted international, national, and local sources, as well as independent bloggers. In the past I used a couple desktop RSS aggregators for track my feeds but I have recently shifted to Google Reader and away from my desktop to allow me to review the daily articles from either my Blackberry (using Google’s mobile application) or any desktop with internet access. I can now read and skim my daily news as I stand in line or save articles for reference or an in-depth read later.

For personal communication I have become an avid user of social networking tools like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter (some of my most common) to stay in touch with my friends, family, and business contacts. I have defined a purpose for each of the tools I use to ensure they remain effective for me rather than becoming a distraction.

• While I have a MySpace account I have invested more effort into Facebook because I found in the beginning it met my needs and lifestyle better than other social networking tools. I use this site primarily to communicate and stay in touch with friends and family rather than business contacts since it offers enough applications (like photo sharing and messaging) that are easy to use for quick updates. This has become increasingly important since I moved 1,600 miles away from my home town and family in 2007—I can used Facebook to stay in touch and let the grandparents, aunts and uncles remain connected with my children and family better than through phone calls.
• Over the years I have become an avid LinkedIn user, although I am not a LinkedIn Open Networker (LION). I use LinkedIn to remain in touch with former colleagues and business partners (present and past) and make connections to support my professional life. I have found this to be a great tool to reconnect with trusted contacts and receive answers to questions, advice, and find referrals. I stream network updates to my RSS feed to gain additional contacts and see profile changes (like career changes) in my existing network.
• Twitter has become a daily tool over the past couple months. I started using it to centralize my status updates among my various social networking tools but have begun using it to reach out to my local community and make meaningful contacts. Over time I am seeing my usage shift to information gathering and sharing as my relationships expand.

While this is just a small sample of the tools I have chosen to enhance my productivity the shift from being PC oriented to cloud oriented is one I expect to continue. The tools are becoming increasingly robust and my connections to the internet are becoming increasingly fast and stable. I will continue to seek additional tools to improve my work and social process.

Technorati Tags: Getting Things Done, GTD, mobile, Productivity, tools

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