Tuesday, June 24, 2008

The Email Diet

Oh, you're really going to love this.
Think emails can help you lose weight?
Nope. In fact, they probably help you gain it.
But what I am talking about here today is how emails help you lose time.
Email diet, bad.

I remember sitting behind my accountant, watching her trying to get into an IRS site to find the answer to some question. I couldn't believe how much time goes by when you are not the one driving the mouse. In the time it took her to find her answer, I could have made a phone call, been redirected four times and boiled water for mac and cheese.

The email ZONE is just like that. A dead zone. You have no idea how much of our valuable writing--and living--time is eaten away at it. For instance, it's slow at work today. Very slow. I opened my email two and a half hours ago, and apart from the stray phone call and a customer, I've been on email all this time!

KILL ME NOW!

So, I've gotten away from TV for the most part. Now it's going to be email. In fact, I think I will take the internet off my cp and only use it for writing. And when I do go to email, I'm going to keep a timer with me. If I need to put every one of my loops on digest--or even pull out of them--I will.

Nothing but emails from editors and agents can be important enough to suck away my time like that again.

I so swear.
Ainsley

2 comments:

Stephie Smith said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Stephie Smith said...

I feel exactly the same way! I no longer have cable TV because I spent so much time flipping through the channels trying to find something I wanted to leave it on while I worked. And then I got sucked into email, with a couple of groups in particular. So I'm on digest now, which has helped enormously. Not only do I just scroll through quickly, rather than stop and read every time an email comes in, but it keeps me from replying to most emails since you can't reply to a digest email without some work. Consequently, I'm spending much more time writing and getting much more done!