Checking email in batches
Email used to be a sure fire way to get in touch with me quickly. I used to be really efficient and on top of it. Anymore, though, I seem to ignore it for a while and check it in batches. It’s kind of odd, I see the preview pop up, I just choose to wait as if it’s a major task or something. I think it’s a combination of gmail slowing down a bit and Firefox being a memory hog that has instilled this behavior (of course, Firefox could be the culprit to gmail being slow, but the difference is the same). No matter the reason, now that I’m in email batch mode, I like it better. It’s far less distracting. The downside is being ignorant to what’s there and, for example, not knowing there’s a meeting until there’s a meeting. Or not realizing an email that I may need to respond to quickly.
So, no more what felt like constant email reading for me. I choose to be inefficient on this one.
Chris Friday, 21 Sep, 2007 Posted at 06:22AM
This is the reason I’ve abandoned RSS readers on my computer – it was far too distracting. Plus, it felt like a game trying to keep the new article counter at zero.
Ryan Friday, 21 Sep, 2007 Posted at 11:53AM
Yeah, I’ve let my feeds go quite a bit lately (past 10-12 days). It’s very rare that I have a blank reader.
I’m subscribed to a Flickr Nikon D80 group, but it’s too hard to keep up with—feels like I’m subscribed to digg. I currently have 1,000+ at the moment (with 75% coming from that D80 group), which is just dumb. It’s probably time to “mark all as read” and start fresh; there’s no catching up now.
Dave O. Monday, 24 Sep, 2007 Posted at 04:32AM
“or not realizing an email that I may to respond to quickly.” And this is where email has been abused. Quick response == phone call. Unfortunately everyone and their brother thinks we all just sit on email or, more importantly, should. Ugh.
I’m starting to the batch processing as well on email. Just minimizing GroupWise and picking it up every now and then. Only way to get anything really done.
Ryan Monday, 24 Sep, 2007 Posted at 05:08AM
When I wrote that I completely forgot about the phone being an option, which is sort of weird… good point, though.
It’s amazing how much the phone has faded out of my life. I basically have a cell phone to talk to my parents and in case of emergencies.