Dissertation writers, professional writers and editors, bloggers–we all fight the good fight against email.
Seth Godin, famous marketing blogger, asks, “Do you spend your day responding and reacting to incoming all day… until the list is empty? “ He says that unlike the days when he could sort his mail in minutes the “old-fashioned way,” he ( and the rest of us, too) can now easily “spend the whole day hitting ‘reply’.” Oddly, when we’re done, we feel we’ve taken care of important work. He calls that the “Inbox Culture.”
Have you reached a breaking point with email? A client says that she would open her messages every morning and before she knew it, an hour of her most productive writing time would be gone. Sound familiar?
And even worse—after she had closed her email she had trouble focusing on her writing because she would still be distracted by the “the messages and the work attached to those messages.”
As a way to fight email and the so-called inbox culture, she is trying to write for at least four hours before even glancing at the names of people who have sent her messages. In addition, she says she won’t read the emails until an hour each evening.
So far, so good, she says—and as a bonus, she moves through the email much faster, quickly responding when necessary and otherwise deleting.
How about you? Have you known for a long time that email is sucking the life out of you?
Robbing you of peak writing time? Robbing you of productivity?
Time’s a-wasting. How about a pact? Stuff your email into one hour a night—is it a deal?
I’d love to hear from you. Let me know how one-hour-a-night emailing works for you.
And if you haven’t already done so, stop by www.nancywhichard.com to sign up for Smart Tips.
No time like the present–
Nancy
Nancy Whichard, PhD, PCC
Your International Dissertation Coach
www.nancywhichard.com
www.smarttipsforwriters.com