Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Take a Vacation from Your Email!
Stepcase Lifehack: "Considering how useful – revolutionary, even – email is as a communication tool, it can also be an incredible drain on productivity. If you’re anything like me, you have discussion listservs, newsletters, Google alerts, Facebook updates, blog comments, advertisements, automated backups, reminders, and all manner of other stuff pouring into your inbox all the time – all in addition to emails from actual people actually trying to communicate with you."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Genius! I would love to do this - but even better - I think we should expand this to text messaging, and other forms of non-verbal communication. I'd love an email-free Friday - but why not take it a step further? Facebook free Friday? Twitter free Tuesday? I think I may just give it a shot.
This is a very good idea. This could help out in the first steps towards getting a better discipline for not going on all of these things that seems to just eat up time. Also, if we can find ways to not separate work and "play" as much then there definitely would be more easing into it. As a study showed in households of less than five children, the amount of information that the kids retained and the grades that they got correlated with the fact that they did their homework all together at the same time as a family. In doing so, they blurred the lines of work and play and thus made it easier for them to like working.
This reminds me of Stanford professor Donald Knuth - he's a computer science professor who first got email in 1975, and in 1990 decided that he no longer needed an email address so he shut it off and hasn't gone back. He does have an email address for some of the issues relating to his books, his secretary prints out anything received there and he looks at the pile every 3 months or so. (He explains it all at http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html )
If a CS professor can go 19 years without email then going a day or even a week without it doesn't seem to be so unreasonable.
Post a Comment