Is Email Ruling Your Life?
May 27th, 2009
It seems kind of strange that I would post previously about how I check my email every five minutes and now talk about not letting email rule your life. I guess it’s a love-hate relationship that I have with email. On one hand, it’s an extremely convenient and quick communicator, while on the other hand you can waste an entire day staring at your inbox if you’re not careful.
Everything is connected to email these days. Your friends send you email, your business contacts, your Facebook updates, appointment reminders, the list is seemingly endless especially if you’re constantly subscribing to newsletters with great information like I do almost on a daily basis.
How do you know if email is taking over your life? If you’ve ever caught yourself sitting at your desk doing busy-work and jumping right to your email as soon as an email comes through, you’re probably in danger. If you quickly interrupt your creative process to check who just sent you a message, you’ve got a habit to break. If you’ve ever reached the end of the day and you feel like all you did was check your email all day, it’s time to get back in control of your time.
Make sure that you close your email, turn off your iPhone, Blackberry, or whatever you use, and make sure you have several periods of uninterrupted work throughout the day. The email will be there when you’re ready to check it. It’s not going anywhere.
It’s your responsibility to make sure that you are spending your time doing the things that make money for your business. It’s essential that where you spend the majority of your time is directly related to generating revenue without interruption. For me personally, during those uninterrupted time periods, I go into “the zone” and I am extremely productive. I’ll slam out the entire day’s work in an hour or two sometimes. However, all that goes to pot if you break your concentration to check a mystery email that just came through and happens to be a piece of junk mail for new Hello Kitty screensavers or something.
Get in contol of your email using an email management software as I mentioned in my previous post, but don’t let your email get in control of you. Peace.
Categories: Nate Burgoyne, Productivity, email
Thanks for posting, I truly enjoyed reading your most recent post. I think you should post more frequently, you evidently have natural ability for blogging!