How the Blackberry Has Given Me Back Some Time

I love my blackberry. It has been a thing of joy since the day I got it. Okay, there have been a few frustrations with not getting things to load right, discovering that most of the useful apps are not free and I have had a few odd glitches that were only resolved with removing the battery and reinstalling it. But all in all, I love my little Blackberry and would be somewhat lost now without it.

You see, it has given me back some precious time with my children and my house is all the cleaner for it. It has even given me, dare I may say, some perspective on my blogging and social networking time. So far I have not figured out how to actually blog from my BB but I don't relish the idea of posting my usual 400 or 500 word post using my thumbs anyways. I still rely on my laptop for that.

I have set my BB to receive my email. No longer do I have to log into blogger to see if anyone left comments on my posts, or log into gmail to see if anyone has sent me an interesting email. No, with a cute little ring tone my mail is announced anytime of the day. It is a simple matter to take a few seconds to glance at my messages no matter what I am doing. I can either delete it immediately or file it away for responding to later. In the case of my May I Present the Evidence post, it gave me a great source of amusement to get your comments periodically throughout the day and giggle over it much to my husband's disgust. I told him if he wanted to know what it was about to read my blog. ;)

What normally happens when you log in to check your emails? You get drawn into it. First you just read it but then you see an interesting link. What's this? A contest. Yes I'll enter that. Oh, if I tweet about it, I can get extra entries. Wow, that's a really interesting post. Oooh look at that recipe and on and on and on it goes.

Now this is not necessarily a bad thing when you have the time. However, when you have a house to clean or children waiting for you to play with them or take them outside or just do something with them, it becomes a complete time sucker.

Whereas with the BB, I'm not really interested in reading web pages on such a small screen or waiting for the graphics or pages to download etc. I have a decent rate plan but still most things are better viewed on a bigger screen.

What the Blackberry has done is freed me from my computer. I thought getting a laptop was liberating, I was no longer chained to a desk to surf the web. Well that's nothing in comparison to web browsing by phone. I can have it in my pocket while I'm outside pushing O on the swing and still check my email. It takes seconds and he is none the wiser. E's happy swinging away, I can catch up on my reading. Easy peasy.

Having this new routine, I realized how much time I had been spending glued to my laptop online and not spending with my kids or working on my house. The basics were getting done but I knew it could be better, more organized. Just like I know my children are going to get older and not want me to play with them. With E going back to school and being gone all day, the younger two expect me to play with them more. One day O won't want mommy to "pay car me".

Which is why many of you will find that I read your blogs in blocks of time. Meaning, I may comment on the last 7 days of blog posts all on one day. I pick the time and place to do my browsing and catching up when I know I have a patch of free time to do it. Like when I'm at work ;)~ This way I still get that little bit of an outlet without taking so much quality time away from my children during the day. Because I haven't even mentioned all the fun things you can do with it.

I'm not saying this will work for everybody, I'm just saying it worked for me. It was a good thing and probably well worth the expense because of it.

Has technology saved you time?