Going Cold Turkey
Sun, Sep 2, 2007
I am presently engrossed in “The 4 Hour Work Week” by Timothy Ferris. He’s my kind of guy!
Seriously, he’s taken the concept of doing more with less to the extreme, something that I have been actively moving to myself as I see that living in KAOS isn’t productive or much fun either.There is a section in the book about how he does this, consisting of a few pages, that I have found worth the price of the whole book and then some.
The first principle from his book that I am ACTing on is cutting down on checking my email. It’s small but so powerful.
How am I doing that? Not by just telling myself I will (or won’t) as I open my email program (again). But by doing something different.
I have created an email account for my assistants which I will check more often because it is generally ACTion items, and that’s what it is all about (and Lisa is going to really be in action soon, she’s expecting a baby any time now!) – the other stuff is almost all just things I read because they are interesting, but not too much that are actually getting me anywhere fast (or slow for that matter).
My other email I will be checking once daily, maybe not even, Timothy checks his once per week. With the effective use of an autoresponder reply and a simple system, it can be done.
Is there a way that you can make your email more effective by doing less?
Anthing else that you might be able to do to work smarter instead of harder?
If you really want an interesting read (it is not boring) and a few business altering ideas, check out Tim’s book…
Cutting down on email time is a fantastic idea. I find myself at my computer, turning on my email notifiers far too often in my day. I think if I could better manage my email time, I would be shocked at how much more I would get done in my day. I wonder what the appeal to constantly be checking email is anyway!
And, yes…. action. That will be one way to describe my upcoming days! 😉