It's 1.15am. This is going to be a long post, but if you have too much email you probably want to read it.
Starting from the beginning. I studied 1994-98. Sometime during that period Hotmail appeared. In short, by the time I graduated anyone who wanted it had email. I was probably one of the first generation never to experience an email-less and internet-less workplace.
I started my own business in March 2006. In summer 2006 I was managing 3 big projects simultaneously. At the same time I managed to get and keep my inbox down to close to zero. By November 2006 my business was growing nicely. February 2007 was a great month, but my mailbox had started to get crowded again. March was another good month. 'Great!', I thought, finally I can clear out my inbox and get my email organized. (In reality my archives were scattered across various files and I still had various '!!! TO READ' folders with 1000+ mails in that I wanted to get to).
So I started to spend less time on business and more on email in order to get rid of this backlog. Being a bit
of a geek I had everything in place. A laptop with wireless and cellular connection that was with me 24 hours
on weekdays. Two 'connected' Windows Mobile smart phones with keyboards that sync'd with my email server so I wouldn't have to process everything twice. The best PIM software and a reasonably okay 'Getting Things Done' workflow. I'd even unsubscribed from many of the email newsletters that
would clog up my inbox and subscribed to the RSS feed in the
anticipation I would get to them in my free time. My typical workflow
became, wake up, email while eating breakfast until I had to head off
to my first meeting which could be 2-3 hours later. On the 30+ minute
train ride I'd also 'purge' email. Walking to the meeting I'd take
advantage of the 5 minute walk to purge email. Lunch. Off to my virtual
office. Sync up. Purge email. I was even really efficient and took
advice to use the phone more and would make a number of phone calls.
1-3 more meetings in the afternoon, purging email in any downtime or
while waiting for late arrivals. Evening would be networking. Train
ride home I'd purge email. Usually I wouldn't have time to sync before
getting on the train so I'd arrive home, sync, and inevitably have more
email to respond to. Usually it was already after midnight, but wanting
to start well the next morning I'd persevere and purge email until I
couldn't stay awake any longer, often falling asleep at the keyboard,
waking up at 4 or 5 am to take a quick shower and take some real sleep
before getting up to purge email. If I was lucky enough to get home
early I'd enjoy dinner and then diligently get back to email, perhaps
stopping for a few minutes break, before taking my laptop to bed where
I'd continue to do email while my wife slept beside me. (A nice
advantage of a wireless home network). When my eyes wouldn't stay open
any longer I'd hit the power key and dump the laptop on the floor next
to me, happy in the knowledge that it would be in easy reach the next
morning to get a quick start on email. (Sometimes it didn't power down
properly and the hard drive buzzed away while I slept but I was too tired to do anything about it).
It wasn't working.
Determined not to be beaten I figured I'd have to work weekends. Something I'd religiously avoided doing while working in a full time job. I've been with my wife since 1994, married since 2000 and I loved chilling out with her on weekends. Still, I was starting a new business and so I thought it's natural I have a lot to do and therefore work on weekends. My wife was very tolerant. So Friday evenings I'd do email. I'd work on the sofa rather than in the home office as it was Friday. Nice to be romantic. Saturdays I'd play tennis getting in some email before or after. Sunday was a day of rest, but inevitably I'd check my email on my phone during the day just to keep on top of things and do email Sunday night so I could have an efficient start for the next week.
Maybe I was beginning to fight back.
Maybe not.
My super-efficient, synchronized email system had a crash in March. No worries. Everything was archived in Google. I replied to the crucial things during the longer than expected delay. Still I was left with an unsorted archive of 800 mails. I figured I'd already answered the most critical and left these in a TO DO folder to catch up on as soon as I could. My new inbox with super-efficient synchronized email system restored was 300 mails. 'Easy', I thought. Throughout March and April I managed to stay in the 300 range, keeping the above zero-downtime schedule. After the holiday season in May when I skipped email for a couple of days I got closer to the 400 mark. Still wanting to stay in the 300s I worked harder and spent more time. Over the last couple of days I topped 500 and if I wasn't writing this now I'd probably check my inbox to find 600+. All this in spite of spending more and more time and having a super 'efficient' system.
So why am I writing this now and not doing email. Well, over the last two weeks, two friends I have a lot of respect for (Gary Bremermann of Power Up English and Robert Leonard Consulting and Patrick Newell of Tokyo International School) have recommended either the 'The 4-Hour Workweek' book or blog. Another friend, when offering a possible solution for my woes, mentioned Brickworks, providers of the Remote Executive Assistant Solution mentioned in above book/blog.
One definition of a fool I've read in numerous places is someone who tries to do more of something they see is not working. The reason I didn't take this advice earlier is that I figured if I could do things smarter and better, the pendulum would swing and my efforts would finally start to pay off. Well, when you get to as close as possible to 24 hours a day 7 days a week and things aren't getting better (in fact my business, bank balance and relationship are all suffering) perhaps it's time to ..... gulp .... give up.
So here I am writing this a now 2.01 am (My wife already got up once a few minutes ago and tried to get me to sleep). Why? On the train home, I was trying to purge email but my software was playing up. Luckily I had the following manifesto (which I guess ironically I had got to via an email) open on my PC.
"The Low-Information Diet: How to Eliminate E-Mail Overload & Triple Productivity in 24 Hours"
I read it. Ignoring it was not much of an option. Having had about 30 minutes email time today and with a 6.00am departure time for my first meeting tomorrow it was was time to admit defeat.
So here I go. Life with less, dare I say almost zero, outbound email? All the things I've been concerned about (auto-responders bouncing to email lists, not pleasing everyone - which wasn't happening anyway) don't really matter any more. My system is not working and I don't want to prove myself an idiot. So my plan is to set up the auto-responders.
I'm sure this won't work. How can I do business without email? It's part of working life, right? Who will I offend??? What opportunities will I miss ???
Will report how things go here. I'm hoping for more time reading books and blogs, some quality time on the phone and in meetings and with my wife, an improvement in my business.
