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Are you thinking your Blackberry use is out of control and you need to turn it off? Forget it. The problem is not the Blackberry, it’s you.

The Blackberry actually gives you the freedom to effectively mix your personal life and work life so that they don’t have to compete with each other.

Don’t talk to me about the idea that the Blackberry undermines your ability to have work-life balance. First, the idea that you could ever have it is ridiculous. But a Blackberry at least gives you hope.

Without a Blackberry, you always had to choose one or the other. Work and life were always competing for large chunks of time in the day. But with the Blackberry, you can have a blended life where work life and personal life complement each other. What I mean is that the Blackberry makes it so you can always do work but also always do your personal life, so you choose which one has priority, minute to minute.

In the 80s, if you went to your kid’s soccer game, you could not do work. Today, you can go to your kid’s soccer game and take the call from the CEO that will change your life (or have a fight with a co-worker) and then go back to soccer. You get both. It’s not one or the other. If you could not take that call, you could not have gone to the game. That’s why the Blackberry is great for your life.

The challenge that the Blackberry brings is that you always need to know your priorities, at any given moment. Anne Zelenka at Web Worker Daily describes this process as really focusing on one or two things and that’s it.

Then ask yourself: Given what you are doing right now, which emails and which calls are important enough to take? If you are not clear on the answer at every given moment, you are constantly having to make difficult decisions about answering emails or not and you feel a false sense of overload by the demands of the Blackberry.

If you are having sex, you have a good sense that very few emails in the whole world need your attention right then. If you are at a birthday party for ten year old boys and they are screaming up and down a soccer field, you are probably bored and emails look a little more enticing. This is not about addicted or not addicted; this is an issue of knowing when email is essential and when it’s a distraction.

You have probably been out to dinner with friends and they checked their Blackberry. This means you are not their most important priority at that time, just for that moment. You of course hope that your presence would make you most important, but in fact, it did not. Does that mean your friend is addicted to her Blackberry? No. It means your friend is prioritizing and she’s letting you know that you rank high enough for in-person, but you don’t trump everyone.

That seems fine. Normal, really. If people would just call a spade a spade and stop complaining about the device and start thinking about how to make better choices for their priorities.

If you want to see a whole generation make great choices about their priorities using the Blackberry, then latch onto Generation Y. They have been managing multiple steams of conversation simultaneously for more than a decade, so they are aces at it. And they are fiends for productivity tips. The most popular blogs are productivity blogs, and Dave Allen is a rock star in this demographic. So young people are constantly using prioritizing tools to make their information and ideas flow more smoothly for both work and life, back and forth, totally braided.

Blackberries are tools for the well-prioritized. If you feel like you’re being ruled by your Blackberry, you probably are. And the only way to free yourself from those shackles is to start prioritizing so that you know at any given moment what is the most important thing to do. Sometimes it will be the Blackberry, and sometimes it won’t. And the first step to doing this shift properly is recognizing that you can be on and off the Blackberry all day as a sign of empowerment.

You’ve probably heard the horror stories about people having their identity stolen along with their money. Fixing the damage can also be a long and costly battle so don’t become an ID theft victim. Here is a list of tips to help protect your identity:

• Protect personal information. Opt out of mailing lists to keep your mailbox free of identity theft temptations.

• Avoid sharing unnecessary credit card information. Resist providing your social security number.

• Shred documents with personal information before throwing them away. It is very common that important account numbers and statements are simply tossed in the trash where they can be easily retrieved.

• Keep documents with personal data secure.

• Choose PINs and passwords that cannot be easily guessed, and do not reveal them to anyone. Be sure to change these codes frequently.

• Never write down PINs and passwords, especially on the outside of envelopes or checks.

• Regularly check your credit report for fraudulent information.

• Exclude personal information from company and family websites.

• Be sure your information is not available via online directories and searchable databases.

• Subscribe to an identity scoring and monitoring system.

*Courtesy of AlliedBarton Security Services

Tags: Identity Theft Prevention,, Identity Protection Services,, identity theft prevention,, identity theft protection,, stop identity theft

A few months ago I gave a talk at the Smith College Social Entrepreneurship Conference. Among the other speakers was Marissa Davis (pictured in this photo, to the right of the yellow t-shirt), an impressive senior from Swarthmore College. Marissa gave an inspiring talk about the organization she founded as an undergraduate, NOLArize!

NOLArize! is an organization of college students across America who are partnering with their local communities to help rebuild New Orleans, “one community at a time.” Marissa, who was born and raised in Jamaica, graduated from Swarthmore in May and continues to run the organization while she works full-time.

Why did a busy student at one of America’s most competitive colleges decide to launch a nonprofit? (more…)

I love this post from Michael McKinney at Leading Blog.  It’s based on a new book from Alvin Felzenberg, The Leaders We Deserved (and a Few We Didn't): Rethinking the Presidential Rating Game.  Felzenberg devised six criteria to best describe various U.S. presidents’ contribution to history.  Based on this exercise, he presents a list of what we should look for in presidential candidates.

Sense of Purpose.  Nearly all presidents who earned a rating of great or near great articulated specific goals that they wanted to achieve as president.

Adversity.  All of the great and near great presidents emerged from conflicts and disappointments they encountered stronger and more resilient ten they had before. This is what made their previous ordeals transformative. All regarded these adversities as learning experiences, however painful. None emerged from such setbacks regarding themselves as victims. None were known to complain or whine—at least out loud or in public—about their private misfortunes.

Broad Life Experiences.  Most great and near great presidents had multiple occupations, not all of them in politics, before coming president. Through the depth and breadth of their experiences, successful presidents learned how to relate to people in all walks of life.

Natural Curiosity.  Great of near great presidents remained curious all their lives about the world around them and about the cause of the problems they were called upon to solve.

Well-Developed Sense of Integrity.  Look for honesty (doing what one said he would do, or explaining why unforeseen circumstances necessitated a different course), courage (meeting adversity head-on, often at political or personal risk), and integrity (placing the interests of one’s office and one’s country ahead of personal convenience or interests, or those of one’s associates).

Humility.  Although confident in their abilities, successful presidents held their egos in check. All great and near great presidents understood that they would receive the credit for the achievements of their subordinates. For this reason they strove to find outstanding ones…including on occasion, former rivals and members of the opposition party.

 I’m including this on Water Cooler Wisdom because I think these characteristics are appropriate for good leaders in all types of organizations, and, for that matter, employees at all levels.

So Bill Gates is preparing to retire as CEO of Microsoft. Gates and his childhood friend Paul Allen founded Microsoft on April 4, 1975, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to make and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800, an early computer that was sold to hobbyists. Gates dropped out of Harvard University in his third year to focus on Microsoft, and the rest, as they say, his history.  For a new Forbes article, I was asked to consider lessons that can be learned from Gates’ amazing career, and here are a few I came up with:

• Gates had a vision of the future that he genuinely believed in (i.e. the potential of computers) and was prepared to take major personal and professional risks to pursue that vision.  He is a man who has never particularly cared what people thought, and so he was able to do things that went against the grain, such as dropping out of Harvard and alienating those who cried antitrust.   We can note, looking at Gates, that those who aren't overly concerned with society's expectations actually have a better shot of transforming that society for the better.

• Even though he was successful at a young age, Gates never sat back and reveled in it.  He continually strove for higher levels of achievement.  His management style was hands-on so that he could firmly control the direction of Microsoft and its products.  He is not a leader who has relied on others to make important decisions on product strategy and other facets of the business, which cuts both ways.  On the one hand, he can count himself personally responsible for Microsoft's many successes, but on the other, he likely suffered a great deal of burnout, which may be part of the reason he's retiring so early.  We should ultimately strive for a working life that allows for some measure of control while leveraging the contributions and talents their of team members.

• Gates was not afraid of failure.  He was never apposed to without trying various tactics to see what would work for Microsoft  – and what wouldn’t.  In his speeches and articles, he has been known to tell of the significant investment in time and dollars that went into failed projects like the Omega database and a joint operating system with IBM.  But if it weren’t for Omega, we wouldn’t have Microsoft Access, and if it weren’t for the discontinued IBM effort, Windows would not have progressed to its current super-product status.  We can learn from Gates that temporary setbacks do not equal total failure but are rather a means to an end. 
  

• Whether through a natural ability or one he honed over time, Gates knows himself and what's meaningful to him.  He let Ballmer take over in 2000 so that he could focus on the areas of the business that intrigued him most, and it's widely recognized how much time and money he devotes to his philanthropic endeavors of global health and education.  It's even said that he's an excellent father.  We should look at Gates as someone who has been successful as a total human being, not just as a businessman.  This is, admittedly, a new definition for success, but one that's becoming increasingly important as the boundaries between the personal and the professional continue to blur.