You’ve come to realize that interacting on these social media methods take a bit of time, and that what you’ve saved in dollars has to be made up in effort and persistence and a lot of human expense. With that in mind, I’m sitting at my kitchen table and I wanted to share with you the first five things I do when the laptop lid goes up. (Note: people subscribed to my newsletter will get my entire day’s tasks sent to them on Monday.)
5 Tasks in the Morning
I open the same four apps every morning: Firefox, Mail, Seesmic Desktop, and TextEdit. My tabs in Firefox are:
- Google Reader – for my news, my searches, my “ego feed” of who’s talking about my stuff.
- Google Calendar – how I live.
- Facebook – I’m not good at Facebook, but I try to stay connected.
- Facebook Trust Agents Community – this is the online community for my book with Julien.
- Friendfeed – I’m no Scobleizer, but I do dip in and look.
- And then usually tabs of stories I want to think more about for later.
- Email – I try to answer 50-100 mails right out of the gate. (I get about 490 a day right now).
- Twitter – I respond to any questions from overnight, and any DMs.
- Google Reader – I find good stories, promoting the best of them on Twitter, commenting on some.
- LinkedIn – I review my connection requests, and/or any other tasks they’ve given me to do (like introduce people).
- Communities – I drop into 2 or 3 communities where I participate, like the Trust Agent group, and some Ning communities, and the like. I leave a few comments, or post some ideas, to keep the sharing going.
I do this reasonably consistently every morning. Why? Because participation is part of the currency. If I’m not in the game, I can’t play.
Do you have five tasks you do quite frequently in the morning with regards to your online world? Do you have any questions about what’s above? What do you do differently?