Obama loves his blackberry

According to today’s NYT, Obama will be the first president to have a laptop in his White House office. Could this be true? He’s giving up his Blackberry for security reasons and apparently this is going to be a major hardship, proof that he’s as human as the rest of us who are tethered to email. I am not convinced I am more productive with a pda, but accept that there is a certain peace of mind that comes from being able to stay on top of email when moving about the world. Downtime though almost never exists, which proves again that email is not really about mail at all….it’s a time and process management tool that spreads influence and control as much as communication about the world. For all this, there is something amazing that happens when you manage to wean yourself off for a couple of days. You start not to miss it too much and when you return, you get a better picture of just how much of it is unnecessary. There needs to be an index for this which we can apply to info-work.