After the ques­tions about gam­ing, the thing I’m asked about the most these days is how I bal­ance work, home, and the crazy speed of the online world. For most of my pro­fes­sional career, the line between work and per­sonal has been blurred, mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to tell where one starts and the other ends. That wasn’t a new phe­nom­e­non (even for me, as this was true when I worked in a book­store and a record store), but it’s been inter­est­ing to watch that line blur for librar­i­ans — and now the gen­eral pub­lic — around the inter­net. I think it’s pretty rare to watch the kind of shift we’ve all gone through dur­ing the last ten years (see Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Every­body), and I’m cer­tainly grate­ful to be observ­ing it firsthand.

So it’s nat­ural to feel over­whelmed — every­one does at some point. Make that “many points.” I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again — the key is to let go of the guilt and rec­og­nize that you can find a bal­ance for any given moment, as long as you acknowl­edge that this bal­ance will be cycli­cal. Some­times you’ll have more time to devote to play­ing with new tools online. Some­times you’ll need to con­cen­trate more on things that are clearly “work.” Some­times you’ll find a happy medium. But what­ever point you’re at will change, and you need to watch for the change points and some­times even force them (if you’re work­ing too much or have been away from “play­ing” for too long).

It’s easy to for­get this or get snowed under one of the cycles and lose the long view, so I thought I’d share some of the things I do in order to use tech­nol­ogy to help main­tain that bal­ance, espe­cially with sum­mer com­ing up for those of us in the U.S. The caveat here is that I’m lucky enough to have the means to do some of these things, as well the will­ing­ness to deal with pushed infor­ma­tion. Your mileage may vary, and I’m not sug­gest­ing that each of these meth­ods will work for every­one, but maybe it will help you think about how you can take more con­trol of your infor­ma­tion flow. I’ve writ­ten and spo­ken quite a bit about using RSS read­ers to track sites and how I’ve been using Google Gears to access mine even when I’m not online. Here are a few other recent things I’ve been doing.

Face­book
I know some peo­ple have given up on Face­book, either because they don’t like it, they don’t have time for it, or they’ve moved their pres­ence to Twit­ter, but I’m still enjoy­ing the social con­nec­tions facil­i­tated by the site. I’m lucky enough to have a lot of friends on FB (ones from “real” life and ones I’ve met through the site who are just as “real”), and I truly appre­ci­ate the pace of the infor­ma­tion flow there.

For me, the LSW Chat Room and Twit­ter can be over­whelm­ing because the pace is so fast and I either can’t keep up or can’t reply fast enough. It’s great that these for­mats work well for oth­ers, but I’m learn­ing that I pre­fer slower updates at this point in my work/personal life. More power to the peo­ple who can keep up with these sites, but I’m a casual par­tic­i­pant at best in them, and I’m okay with that, at least for now.

Lately, I haven’t had as much time to play in Face­book with appli­ca­tions, Scram­ble, pages, etc., but I really appre­ci­ate the short updates on what my friends are doing. For many of those peo­ple, I’ve set up my pref­er­ences in Face­book Mobile to send those updates as texts to my phone because I don’t want to miss when they change their sta­tus. It’s a pas­sive way to have infor­ma­tion pushed at me when I don’t have time to man­u­ally check the site. I can do this because I have an unlim­ited tex­ting plan, but then I also use SMS as one of my top com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools. In fact, it’s prob­a­bly sec­ond behind face-to-face contact.

So tip num­ber one is to get an unlim­ited tex­ting plan if you can afford it and have your friends’ infor­ma­tion pushed to you through texts. At Sprint, unlim­ited tex­ting is absurdly cheap, some­thing like $20/month for every­one on the plan. Plus, then you can text Google, Ama­zon, and other ser­vices, as well as your friends and fam­ily. I real­ize not every­one can afford that, but if you can, it’s really worth it.

Twit­ter
I’ve already men­tioned that I have trou­ble keep­ing up with Twit­ter, but that doesn’t mean I don’t use it or enjoy it. When I have time, I access the ser­vice using Twhirl. Even though you have to down­load the client, it makes it *much* eas­ier to track con­ver­sa­tions, reply, direct mes­sage, and do other things. It’s def­i­nitely my pre­ferred method for real-time inter­ac­tion with Twitter.

But it can be dis­tract­ing, like try­ing to work in a room full of your friends who are hav­ing inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tions, so at best, I mostly just watch the con­ver­sa­tions, the way I read blogs. Some­times I have time to also par­tic­i­pate, but usu­ally when I can give some par­tial atten­tion to Twit­ter, it’s to read and keep up with what my friends are talk­ing about. I have very few friends on the ser­vice who only post sta­tus updates; the major­ity of peo­ple I know there are hav­ing con­ver­sa­tions, so I don’t have tweets sent to my phone, as it would be too over­whelm­ing. The one excep­tion to this is dur­ing con­fer­ences, as those are times when Twit­ter has a more imme­di­ate rel­e­vance for me, because it facil­i­tates face-to-face inter­ac­tion and tells me which are the hot sessions.

Social Aggre­ga­tors
I’ve been test­ing these new social aggre­ga­tors because I really need a good one to help me track my friends on all of these var­i­ous ser­vices (ver­sus my news aggre­ga­tor, which tracks my infor­ma­tion feeds). The more ser­vices I’m on, the more I wish these aggre­ga­tors would get a move on already. I’ve exper­i­mented with a few of them and have decided that none yet meets my needs. I really like SocialTh­ing because my friends don’t have to be on the ser­vice for me to see their updates. ST imports my exist­ing friends from a few ser­vices and dis­plays them in a stream, com­bin­ing Face­book, Flickr, and Twit­ter. The site is still in beta, but it doesn’t track *enough* ser­vices for it to be my only source. I can’t add a blog feed for a friend, and I can’t link directly to a Face­book friend’s wall or my inbox to reply to one per­son. How­ever, on days I can’t lurk on Twhirl, catch­ing up with a quick scan of SocialTh­ing once or twice a day has been invalu­able in keep­ing me in touch with what my friends are doing and saying.

So I’ve also been play­ing with Friend­Feed, but like Goldilocks, it’s not quite right either, mainly because your friends have to already use the ser­vice in order for you to see their updates. Unlike SocialTh­ing, Friend­Feed relies on the user to enter all of her accounts into a pro­file that oth­ers can then sub­scribe to within the site. But most of my friends don’t have pro­files there, so while FF sup­ports many more social net­works than ST, it’s less use­ful in the long run because I’m miss­ing most of my friends’ updates.

I’ve decided I need the auto­matic import of SocialTh­ing (as well as the flow of it) with the expan­sive­ness of Friend­Feed in a desk­top client like Twhirl. I would pre­fer a tool that lets me access my social­stream on the web, via a client, or on my cell phone, let­ting me choose which method works best for me at any par­tic­u­lar moment, but right now I’ll take what­ever I can get. I thought Mugshot might be it, but I couldn’t get it to work prop­erly (it wouldn’t show updates from my friends). I don’t think we’re far off from the first really use­ful social aggre­ga­tor, but it can’t get here soon enough.

Smart­phones
I want to stress again that if you can take advan­tage of hav­ing your updates from your friends lifestreamed to your phone via text mes­sages, it will help you feel more con­nected to them and remove some of that guilt of not check­ing sites man­u­ally. But I want to stress just as equally that you should not let that stream take over your “real” life. I’m always shocked to hear that some­one won’t buy a cell phone because they don’t want to always be answer­ing it or that they don’t want to always be connected.

Peo­ple assume that I’m always on my cell phone and at times I am. But there are just as many times I’m not, and I don’t let it dic­tate my behav­ior. If I don’t rec­og­nize the phone num­ber of a cal­ller or if I don’t feel like it at that par­tic­u­lar moment, I don’t answer the phone. And just because my phone pulls in new email every hour doesn’t mean I actu­ally check it every hour. In fact, I really only check it when I’m wait­ing for an ele­va­tor at work (which actu­ally hap­pens quite a bit), not needed for the cur­rent dis­cus­sion in a meet­ing, stand­ing in line at a store, rid­ing on the bus, or some other sit­u­a­tion of my choosing.

So yes, I get a lot of use out of my phone to help me keep up, but I’m also good about ignor­ing it, espe­cially if I’m out with friends or doing other things. I do think this is a learned behav­ior, one that we need to teach our kids, and we need to be good role mod­els for this. Being con­nected but offline requires skill, just like being online but dis­con­nected does (if you’re doing this, you know what I mean). If tech­nol­ogy is mak­ing you feel guilty, exam­ine the sites you use to see if there are alter­na­tive ways to access cer­tain pieces of them and fig­ure out if they might work bet­ter for you. The future of the inter­webs is in shift­ing ser­vices to where the user is instead of forc­ing them to come to the ser­vices. Take advan­tage of that and let go of the guilt that you can’t digest every­thing (another skill we need to learn and teach oth­ers). As I said at the Com­put­ers in Libraries con­fer­ence last month, do you feel guilty that you don’t read every book that comes into your library? Dis­ap­pointed maybe, but I’ll bet you don’t feel guilty.

So those are a few of my quick thoughts about all of this. I’d love to hear how you’re using some of the new sites and tools to find some balance.