Checking my messages

My alarm goes off at 6:30 in the morning, and if that doesn't get me out of bed, the trucks rumbling by get noisier by 7. Most mornings I roll over, grab my phone and check my email -- although the first email of the day is more of a purging of spam that slipped through the filter over night. I occasionally also have to respond to a text message that came in the dark of night from some drunk or desperate friend or maybe one of those East coast colleagues who forget it's three hours earlier here…

Then I wander downstairs to my computer where I check Twitter for mentions @bissell, Direct Messages, and new followers I might want to follow back. More and more often the followers are Twitter whores trying to sell me services to get more followers, so less and less do I follow them back (an ironic circle when you think about it).

Next I pop over to the Facebook tab to respond to any messages and check notifications. Granted, I already know if I have messages before I get there as I get a notice in my email, but responding still requires a visit to the ever changing Facebook interface.

I peek in on LinkedIn somewhere in there, but as I'm not actively hiring, and LinkedIn has become more of an online job fair, I don't seem to get a lot of contact there.

Of course I need to check out my blog to see if there are comments that need to be purged or responded to. While I'm there, I look over the logs which tell me not only how many people have visited my blog but where a lot of them came from. So, if I see an intriguing keyword or a link from a site I'm not familiar with, I have to take a peek just to see in what context people are talking about me. (Someone liked my blog about being out of shape today… Hmm…)

Messages are sometimes hidden in data, so I have to check the stats from other logs for the primary Conquent websites and projects. I have a little overview dashboard that pulls stats from multiple places so I know things like Google owes Conquent 11 bucks for advertising, the Hallmark Channel Valentines Day campaign is over, and I found that Jokeindex.com was broken because there was no traffic at all.

Over to the Conquent Task Manager where I assign a quick task to the tech managing Jokeindex, review a couple other tasks assigned to me, and write the appropriate responses.

Back to the cell phone to check voice mail, and then I can take a shower, finish my coffee and get my ass to the office. Of course when I get to the office there's US Mail, FedEx pouches and UPS boxes, but we don't really count that as part of our daily communication anymore, do we?