Thursday, October 19, 2006

Email is a Distraction

I've gotta get my ducks in a row. My most recent discovery, thank you Tony Steward, is a website called www.43folders.com

Yesterday I learned that email keeps us from being productive. Constant dings, and send/receives are distracting me from getting work done. Rather than keeping my email set to auto receive every 10 minutes, I've changed it to every hour.
While Andy is going to hate this, it's required for a scatter brained person such as myself in order to stay focused and get things accomplished. Also by doing this, I can more effectively manage my emails because I'm doing them in batches rather than constantly trying to sort through the junk, non junk, long reply, short reply, searching for a file to send to someone, another task (that gets ahead of other tasks because now it has my attention), or a thankful thursday from my mom (that reminds me that I love my life so I need to call my husband because now I miss him).
See...if we allow these distractions all day long, whenever they so choose to command our attention it becomes a constant people pleasing catastrophe. I hope my life will take new shape after this new step of planning infuses into my life.
Check back I'll let you know.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

43 Folders is great. I have their RSS feed going right to my Google homepage. I first heard about them on TWiT's MacBreak Weekly podcast... also a great resource. (Of course, second only to SYM).

I like getting distracted by email, though, because my job is mindnumbingly boring when I'm stuck indoors. And anything to keep me from doing actual work is a good thing, I think.

In fact, I should be working now, but instead, I comment on a 2-week old Blog.