Blinders on, Please! Dealing with online and other distractions

I often get distracted.  Horses drawing carts and racing to the finish line are equipped with blinders to keep them from bolting, straying, etc….I need to develop my own.

It’s really not too surprising that I follow a meandering path at times, since I am a regular Facebook user, as well as loving to take photographs (and post them on Flickr, Shutterfly, the aforementioned Facebook, sometimes editing them in Photoshop). I also subscribe various regular emails like MarketingProfs, Raintoday, AdobeEdge, BNET newsletters, BtoB alerts*, Cutting Edge PR e-news**. And then again, I’m left-handed, right-brained, an attention-seeking middle child.

Alas, one of the regular emails I used to get that I’ve now given up in a feeble attempt to reduce the overload is a daily Calvin & Hobbes comic. 

Even now, as I sit at my sister’s house, I could be blogging, or out riding a nice little horse, or organizing my contacts (a slew of recently gathered business cards and scraps of paper with names and phone numbers is splayed around my laptop), getting ready to go dancing, meditating (that’s probably what I SHOULD be doing, to get centered), returning some phone calls, updating two different websites, emailing back some contacts or weeding out older emails that I’ve saved for digesting later.  I try to keep my email inbox under 500 emails.  I did just cut down my current count by about 40 emails in the past 30 minutes (and also learned WOM means word of mouth, as in WOM marketing via Twitter).  I do love my Gmail, as it allows me to post pictures of my friends in the contact list, put a star by emails I need to follow up with, and has wonderful search functionality to let me find an email thread.

* ONE DAY COULD SAVE $3.5 B

BtoB informed readers on 2/9/09 that the US Post Office operates at a deficit of about $2.8 billion per year.   It’s considering  reduce its services to five days of operation instead of six.

**2 tasty tidbits today from this source:

1) Quote of the Day:

“43% of all statistics are worthless.”
- anon

2) “Internet news is more popular than newspapers”:

In 2008, for the first time, more Americans relied on the Internet for national and international news than on newspapers. In December 2008, 40% of those surveyed said they get most of their news from the Internet, up from 24% in September 2007, while 35% still mainly read newspapers, and 70% say television is their primary source of news.

And for the Gen Y age group (18-29), the Internet was level pegging with TV as the most popular source of news, accounting for 59% of this age group’s news sources. There was a big drop to newspapers at 28% and radio at 18%. The message for PR people: start taking Internet news sources seriously in media campaigns, especially with certain demographic groups such as Gen Y.

Source: Pew Research Center, http://pewresearch.org