Every Morning

coffee Chris Brogan's post inspired me to tell you about my morning work routine. Like many social media enthusiasts I get lots of strange and anxious looks when I tell them about the way I work and the information I process. They're even more surprised when they hear it doesn't take as much time as you would think.

We'll here's my daily morning routine! Every morning, when I work at the office or at home, I open the following applications:

  • Outlook (client or web) = work email. Usually I can go grab a cup of coffee before Outlook is ready to use... I go through my mail following the GTD flow and empty my inbox (inbox zero). All email that can be processed in 2 minutes (which is about 90% of my email...) is done right away. Other emails contains tasks which are put on my Outlook task list, or contain an appointment (and is automatically put in my Calendar). If a task has to be finished by a certain date I'll allocate a slot in my calendar to be finished on time. I check my calendar for today's meeting and get an alert just before the meeting.
  • Gmail = private email. I process this inbox in the same way as Outlook.
  • Google Reader. I use this feed reader to pull information about the things that interest me, to me (about 200 feeds). Postrank helps me filter through feeds of sites and Google Alerts. Some sites have too many updates for me to process. Postrank tells me which one's are important or interesting. I usually don't read the posts right away. I star posts that seem to be interesting. I'll read them when I have time (on Friday afternoon or in between meetings). I also use Google Reader to back up my tweets and the tweets of people I follow.
  • Brizzly. I catch up on tweets using Brizzly. I used to use TweetDeck, but like Brizzly better. I mostly use Twitter for business purposes. I organized my followers in two groups that are important and interesting to me. People not in those two groups can get promoted by followers in my groups.
  • Yammer. We use Yammer for enterprise microsharing. I check the updates in Yammer.
  • FriendFeed. I used to use FF to merge all the social media streams I have into one stream. I stopped using it, because I found most stuff in FF were tweets anyway. I do dip into FF because of the interesting Youtube video's and pictures that are shared by friends. So I have a specific saved search to filter them out.
  • Google News. I check the news quickly (Dutch section).
  • Intranet. I check if there's any interesting corporate news.
  • Facebook. If I have some time I'll quickly see if their are Facebook updates. I mostly use Facebook to stay in contact with family and friends.

This takes about 30-45 minutes of my time. I don't have a smart phone (yet). I practically do this the same way every morning. A work routine is important in general, but definitely when you use social media. If I have a meeting in the morning, I'll do this later during the day or in the evening.

This is my way to stay connected with my friends, experts in the field and colleagues.

So, what does your morning routine look like?

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