Email is just email

Many of you, over time, dis­cov­ered that email­ing me was darn near as fast as IMing some­one else. I’ve long since largely signed off of AIM and MSN and Yahoo and the oth­ers because of the time vac­uum they became for me, but now I’m even rolling back how fre­quently I check my email.

I’ve come to the real­iza­tion that multi-tasking is a farce. Truly. It seems like you’re doing more, but in real­ity you’re doing more of less. So where a blog post will take me ten min­utes to pound out. If I’m read­ing the news, email­ing, talk­ing on the cell phone and blog­ging, I can do all of those in 45 min­utes, each of them has lower qual­ity in the end and if I did them sequen­tially it would only take me thirty min­utes to do all of them.

So, over the past week, I’ve begun exper­i­ment­ing. First, I removed the mail noti­fiers in Fire­fox. But even then I used the easy to access book­marks and checked it even more fre­quently to see if I had any new email. So the next step was to actu­ally cre­ate a sec­ond pro­file in Fire­fox solely for the use of email. When I open that account my start pages are my two main per­sonal email accounts. That’s all that pro­file is for.

I was astounded by how much more I accom­plished in my day. So I took it a step further.

I removed Google reader noti­fi­ca­tions, so I no longer have a new blog post to dis­tract me every 3 min­utes. Now I check my reader twice or three times a day. Yes I still read 70+ feeds, but with the mas­tery of the Google Reader key con­trols I can skim through them in a mat­ter of ten min­utes usu­ally. Shar­ing or star­ring entries of inter­est to be read later.

I check my work email when I get to work, since I come in when the other employ­ees are halfway through their day I have to catch up on any events or changes, but it doesn’t need me to keep Thun­der­bird open on the lap­top. Now I check it after the com­ple­tion of other tasks. At this point, I can pretty safely avoid open­ing Thun­der­bird for the rest of the day, every­one else is gone and it’s just me here.

It’s amaz­ing how much more pro­duc­tive I am when I make tasks sequen­tial rather than simultaneous.