Chris’s post got me thinking about two things. One was my own dual style of working: management vs creative. The best encapsulation of the dichotomy there as relates to running a creative business I have yet read is by Paul Graham, found here. Go, read it. I’ll wait. The second is the concept of interruptive technology versus the concept of disruptive technology. I see those two terms interchanged often, yet I don’t actually find the concepts interchangeable.

Interruptive Technology

These are technologies most often used to complete a task or communicate. I rank mine in order of “interruption level” in the video. What makes a technology interruptive is how it alters the work flow or life flow of another person or company. That means email will remain the least interruptive (in my opinion) and the most useful, for now, at tracking the minute and changeable details of a project. The phone and in person meetings or conference calls remain the highest level of interruptive technology with the lowest return. Yes, you get to see the body language (meeting/web cam) or hear the vocal inflection (phone/conference call) with these technologies, but they leave room for excessive blocks of time not spent working on a project, and for project details to slip through the cracks with no written record.

Disruptive Technology

Though this term is often used interchangeably with the above (as you can see in the replies to Chris’s post), to me it is not at all the same thing. A disruptive technology may involve communication (like Twitter) and it may become interruptive (like Twitter or Instant Message services), but it has a wider impact, disrupting an entire system, not just an individual work flow (like Twitter DMs and their effect on Email, or like Google Wave is hoping to disrupt multiple systems, including chat, message service, email and more). It is that system wide disruption as opposed to an individual, more myopic effect, that sets the two apart for me.

And Then There Is Ego

Once you realize how interruptive technology diffuses your efficiency and can put speed bumps and road blocks in your work flow, you may turn to disruptive technologies to manage your systems (Away Find is a great example of this, as is Evernote, and also using a mobile phone and voice mail to control what reaches you to interrupt your flow without missing the important items). So where does ego come into play?

Ego becomes its own problem when people begin to take your time management personally. There are a number of people and companies I work with that are awesome, and that have time management systems of their own. They see that I try to work within their parameters, and they do their best to respect mine – it s a win-win (It helps that I started adding an “effective work flow for this project” section in contracts). Then you get people who aren’t able to see your system (or the systems of others) as time management – these folks take it as a personal slight if an email isn’t replied to immediately, and then, they begin to bombard your system structure like a Kamikaze pilot from WWII – hitting your DM box, your email repeatedly, your phone, text, instant message windows and more in a look at me blitzkrieg. What kills me is the message is often then “Hey, call me ASAP.” and not “These xx items are urgent because of xx. I know you are writing per your away message, but could you please contact me.” (Guess which one would actually get a response from most people, by the way.)

Truly, there is not much you can do about how someone else’s feelings work. Personally, aside from doing my best to be tactful and understanding, I haven’t found a “magic formula” for the times when ego enters the equation. Have you?  How are you using disruptive technology to handle interruptive technology?

As part of the presentation I revealed my Social Media Toolkit, and recommended that each person in the room build their own toolkit to help them navigate the choppy waters of social media applications and sites. At the end I handed out a brief write up about my own toolkit in the hopes it would help people pick out tools of their own.

Tools To Manage Social Media Work Flow

EVERNOTE

Evernote.com is a note taking tool. It’s like having a little notebook on hand at all times, online and on the desktop, to help you remember whole pages or snippets of pages for later. There is also a FireFox 3.x and Flock add-on for Evernote in addition to the desktop app and web site. This lets you take notes on the fly, the tag them and sort them into groups.

SHAREAHOLIC

Shareaholic.com is a FireFox and Flock browser extension (and FaceBook application) created by Jay Meattle of Lookery. It lets you share your online finds anywhere online (from FaceBook and Delicious to Digg, Twitter and more). This way you can send the content you find online wherever you want right away – no more bookmarking things for later and coming back to try and find out where you put them.

UBIQUITY / FIREFOX 3.x

If you haven’t downloaded Mozilla Lab’s own productivity add on, Ubiquity, you should. You will never feel the same about typing Option+Space again. It opens up a whole on-the-go world of wikis, translation tools, email, Google integration (including inserting maps and graphics into docs, emails, etc as you surf) and more. It even has shortcuts for Twitter. Ubiquity is located at people.mozilla.com/~avarma/ubiquity-0.1.1.xpi

PING.FM

For maintaining the profiles you aren’t active on. Use this to send messages to groups of profiles all at once right from Google Talk or the web. Since my chosen three tools are Twitter, LinkedIn and FaceBook, I use this to maintain a presence on Pownce, Identi.ca, Rejaw, Kwippy, and other microblogging sites where I have claimed my brand to keep them “fresh”.

ADOBE AIR APPLICATIONS (TWHIRL, TWEETDECK, ETC)

Whether you like Twhirl.org or Tweetdeck.com/beta (or whatever other Adobe Air app that does the trick for you), if you want to efficiently surf Twitter (and other sites like 12Seconds and FriendFeed) you need a desktop client to help you keep things sorted. My favorite for business use is TweetDeck with integrated search and groups to help you sort your noisy stream into family, friends, co-workers, etc.

TEXTEXPANDER (MAC) (Not aware of a PC equivalent)

This shareware application lets you create text shortcuts for the words, phrases, email address, numbers, code snippets and anything else you type repeatedly. It can save you as much as 3 hours a day of repetitive typing time. For the blogger with multiple blogs or the professional writer, it is a huge help. Find it at smileonmymac.com/TextExpander/

QUICKSILVER (MAC) (Vista Start Menu is closest equivalent for PC)

Keyboard shortcuts for the applications on your Mac. The closest PC equivalent is Vista Start Menu, but it isn’t as effective as QuickSilver.com for managing applications and other functions.

GOOGLE (Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Analytics, etc)

If you aren’t using the plethora of free tools offered by Google.com for collaborative online documents and spreadsheets, email, web stat monitoring, chat and more, you should be. Not only do they save you time and money on their own, they also work hand in hand with most add ons like Ubiquity and Evernote for even more productivity enhancement.

HTC MOGUL running iCal and SyncMate for Mac (or any SmartPhone, PDA, Blackberry, iPhone with calendar and syncing tools for Mac or PC)

The modern equivalent of a secretary keeping your calendar and handling your communication and a notepad and pen for your pocket.

Alternate Tools

HelloTXT – similar to Ping.fm but not as effective or easy to use

Flock 2.0 Beta – integrates all social media into your web browser, but can get very noisy and crowded

Tab Mix Plus – my favorite FireFox extension for surfing the web with organized, saved tabs. Evernote makes this unnecessary for most people now.

From the short Managing Your Social Media Work Flow presentation by Leslie Poston

Managing Your Social Media Work Flow by Leslie Poston is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at uptownuncorked.com. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://magnitudemedia.net.

I have an arsenal of tools I use, such as Ping.fm and Evernote, to help me keep pace with all of the places in the social media world that I am connected with. I also focus the bulk of my attention on a few core social media sites, like Twitter, that I have determined to have the most value for me.

By focusing on a few sites, having an arsenal of tools that I know inside and out to help me manage these sites and others, and by planning my time wisely, I am able to keep up with the fast paced world of social media and still get my work done each day.

If you would like to hear what my tools are and how I use them, as well as get some concrete advice on how to create your own tool set, stop by The Grog in Newburyport next Thursday (10/23) at 7PM. I’ll be presenting a short talk on Managing Work Flow in Social Media to the North Shore Web Geeks at their monthly meeting. All are welcome.