Focus, focus, focus

I lost focus. It's summer break. I taught during the first half of the summer session and took a FANTASTIC vacation with the family. I followed that up with a not-so-fantastic knee surgery to reconstruct my left ACL and meniscus. (Not fun.)

So I'm finally emerging from the fog of vacation and knee pain medication.

I need to focus.

I returned to my newsroom with a lot of focus on. Our newsroom attempted to launch an updated CMS and it didn't go as planned. Many CMS launches happen that way. I'm trying to be patient and not freak out - since I'm not able to control the situation. But I have to retrain hundreds of students. The hardest part is the rules are changing on a regular basis until we get a handle on what works best for the system. Luckily our entire newsroom how-to guides are built into a wiki-structure so any of my employees can help me update the many changes. While I try to keep up with these challenges, I still have daily assignment desk duties where I need to help manage our general assignment reporters, make sure they tweet, answer questions and get stories from callers and try to keep up with conversations on Twitter and Facebook.

I need to focus.

My job requires me to focus on so many tasks at the same time, I'm losing focus. I started using CoTweet to keep up with all of our reporters and anchors to keep a constantly updated Twitter feed. I'm now looking at tools like Seesmic and Hootsuite so I can do the same oversight with our Facebook page at the same time. So far, none of the tools I've found meet all of my needs. And it needs to help me stay focused.

I'd love to hear from others who are finding tools that help coordinate and focus the many things we have to do at the same time these days.

UPDATE: I got a great tip from Nathan Byrne on how he's using more management collaborations in Google Wave. I've done many things in Basecamp and Google Groups, but not in Wave. Thanks for the idea! Keep them coming!