Five Tasks in the Morning

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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 Agents 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?