The Crackberry A Corporate Noose or Time Leveraging Tool

For better or for worse the Crackberry is here to stay. Once only reserved for techies, the Crackberry is now a mainstay in the corporate environment, allowing professionals to quickly access information and communicate with others on the go. They've become extremely popular among sales people, techies, lawyers, accountants and political assistants. Some CEOs use them but the people who are the most productive don't seem to have them. Advertising

Originally touted as a personal productivity machine, the Crackberry is quickly becoming a time trap and the corporate drug of choice. If you have one, think about how many times you check your Crackberry in a day. Once, twice, or hundreds of times a day? Try counting. A lot of managers like to get their staff onto them so they can more easily intrude on their personal lives. Advertising

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Employers, co-workers and clients expect more access to your personal time and expect emails responses in minutes and not hours. To compound this problem, with many features and software add-ons, there is a tendency to spend excessive time doing non-productive activities like playing cards on the Crackberry. In the end, this leaves you with less time to meet your deadlines and spend with your family or friends. Advertising

Here are 10 ways you can turn your Crackberry from a corporate noose to a time leveraging tool. Advertising

• Load only applications that you need.
• Turn off your Crackberry when you are in meetings.
• Turn off your Crackberry when you are working on a file or project.
• Allow only important clients and co-workers to have access to your Crackberry email.
• Budget non-work time to play with your Crackberry.
• Stop walking and typing at the same time.
• Turn off your Crackberry during downtime.
• Save those long emails for the office.
• Set a Crackberry use policy and stick to it.
• Start a Crackberries Anonymous group.

In other words, find a way not to check your Crackberry every second. If you can manage to do this, you are on your way to recovery. If you come across any other suggestions, please add them in the comment section below. If not handled right, these things can become so unproductive, it is not funny.

Tatsuya Nakagawa is president and CEO of Atomica Creative Group Ltd., a strategic product marketing company based in Vancouver Canada. He has assisted numerous companies in diverse industries with their early stage deployments and product launches in North America, Europe and Asia. He ditched his Crackberry in January after having been on it for a year. Peter Paul Roosen has an engineering background and founded numerous companies including firms involved in locomotive and plastics manufacturing, computer software and marketing. He never got a Crackberry and still uses an old school notebook for organizing stuff.