One podcast that has been on my subscription list forever is Manager Tools. I’ve been fortunate enough to experience managing some great teams and have had over 100 people under me in the org. chart, but I still get something worthwhile out of every episode.
They had a recent cast about schedule management and I realized that email has been taking up an increasing amount of my time. I’m going to see if I can corral my email management down to 4x per day. Let’s see if I can kick the habit… If only there was some kind of patch.
ps – I’m trowing twitter overboard too.
5 replies on “Email Challenge”
The first step in the recovery is admitting the problem, John.
That’s why I’ve formed EA, Email Anonymous. Here’s how it works. Every time you have the urge to check email, you call one of your EA buddies — who in turn comes over and drinks with you until the urge goes away:-)
So far, for day 1: I took an hour off from continuous email…
John,
As you might imagine from our podcast, I’ve never been quite able to fathom the allure of twitter … it seems there are already too many sources of distractions I have to fight through to be effective. One more? I don’t think so.
Ron, sign me up for EA … I’ve reduced considerably my old ineffective behaviors around email, but once an addict, always an addict. 😉
And John, thanks for the kind remarks on the show.
regards,
Mike
Manager Tools
Interesting post from Doug Kaye over at Blogarithms. He describes how the instantaneousness of things like Twitter are changing the dynamics of content.
http://www.blogarithms.com/index.php/archives/2007/12/20/the-real-time-blogosphere/
John-
Thanks for the kind words! I see Mike has already fessed up…I wrestle daily with it, and email is only half of my daily correspondence, thanks to our forums.
And Twitter is just idiotic. We think of it as the IM of the social web, which is to say, a BAD idea, web-ified.
Mark