Archive for January, 2008

Before I got my first blackberry, I hated the idea. Mostly because I hated people with the “blackberry twitch”; ie: that incessant need to check the phone every time it buzzes/dings/etc with a new email message.

When I finally *had* to get my first berry, I determined that I’d do everything in my power to avoid this. I knew I’d still *check* my email frequently, but that’s different than the constant distraction of the Evil Flashing Red Light, the Slightly Sexy Silent Buzzing and Nebulous BlackBerry Twitch.

So here’s what I’ve done to avoid that. It isn’t perfect, but it works for me:

1. Use Gmail, instead of blackberry mail. It’ll stop the buzzing, which is good. It’ll also segregate out your SMS messages from your email, which is hugely useful (SMS still buzzes). 2. Don’t use your blackberry email address for regular mail. Sync everything up through your gmail or main email account. Forget you have a blackberry mail account. 3. EXCEPT, set your mail server (or Gmail) to forward all emails with a subject line of “URGENT” to your blackberry mail account 4. Set your blackberry to go off with a specific ringtone when it receives messages with “urgent” in the subject line 5. If you use Twitter via SMS, use TwitterBerry or a similar client, so messages don’t get lost in your SMS queue.

Basically, use Gmail to keep your data usage down and to stop the buzzing, route urgent emails to your blackberry mail and prioritize it properly, segregate out all non-essential communication (ie: Twitter / Pownce / etc).

This’ll allow you to check mail when YOU want to (which’ll still probably be every 5 minutes, heh), to check your non-essential communiques when YOU want to, get stuff that’s actually urgent right away and not lose your SMS messages (which most blackberry users do).