Work productivity, time management, organization, tools and tips

Research in Motion's (RIM) email service via BlackBerry smartphones experience outage last Monday. This has affected all the subscribers from USA and Canada. The RIM outage was acknowledged through an email from RIM'S Bryan Simpson.

Crackberry users were definitely given a much-needed break from all those sending and receiving of emails. But what if you think that your business greatly depends on this convenience? Here are simple ways that you might want to consider if you never want to suffer from this type of service interruption again:

- If you used to only tinker BlackBerry while on the road, make it now a habit to bring your laptop - MacBook Air for the extravagant mobile worker; Asus EEE PC for the practical ones who only need to do basic stuff. The common denominator here is portability.

- If you still can't get over your BlackBerry, have an implicit away-from-my-desk-like response whenever you can't be reached through your BlackBerry email. Inform your clients/staff beforehand that if you can't be reached through email, you have just recently considered SMS and calling as alternatives.

- Or as a last resort depending on your tendencies, finally get rid of your email inbox checking obsession. Do it just once or twice a day - this way you will not feel that cranky if these outages happen again. Or if you can, hire an on-call virtual assistant who can help you perform your emergency email management.