Digital life is one big refresh.
Even if we get bad news by constantly checking email or text messages, we assume something different – maybe better – will happen when the next one alerts us.
It’s actually the opposite.
Email delivered whenever it arrives is like the mail carrier coming back to your house all day and all night to drop off one more message that he/she didn’t deliver the last time.
To gain control of email and become more productive and, more importantly, less stressed, treat checking email like making a scheduled phone call.
Don’t even look when you’re notified.
Schedule a time to check and then and only then, check the mail.
You decide on how many times and at what part of the day you want to “schedule” an email check based on your work, your energy level and other things you need to do.
Then, divide emails into two categories – the one’s you can answer quickly and the ones that need further thought. Then schedule it for a later response.
Put a hold on immediate email notifications.
Stress and anxiety are big issues in our lives today. One way to make a dent in stressors is to take control of the great interrupter called email by using these hints to stop the addiction.
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Hi Jerry,
Perfection is such a great topic!
I admit that I aim for perfection, taught to me, in part, by my folks, and later in the Air Force, and during my TV and radio career. (You and I have chatted before.)
In 1967, I was a kid just out of high school in suburban Boston and helped put together a small radio station in our town. Yup, the FCC found out about the operation, showed up in person, and as the two-man crew left, they whispered: “We get a lot of these stations, but yours is the most professionally-run that we’ve ever seen!” WOW!
The local papers did a couple of stories about two brothers and a friend running this station out of our friend’s home. It caught the eye of a local resident who, it turns out, was the film director at Ch. 7 in Boston. He asked if I’d like a summer job in his film department? And, my friend with the keen electronic background, ended up in Master Control.
(Later, he moved to Dallas to open his own audio company, went on the road with folks like Cat Stevens and Willie Nelson, today operates his own station QX-FM.com and recently opened a communications and broadcast museum, profiled on this Texas program: http://thetexasbucketlist.com/2016/04/the-texas-bucket-list-texas-museum-of-broadcasting-and-communications.)
I’m getting ahead of myself. :)
One day at work, as I was splicing commercials together, my boss, the film director, asked me about a problem that impacted commercials on the air. Turns out that during my inspection and cleaning of the commercial film reel being readied for broadcast, I had failed to remove a three-inch piece of masking tape used as a reminder that a missing commercial needed to be inserted at this point on the reel. The head of engineering came down and was none too happy with me as the film reel gummed up the projector, and I couldn’t blame anybody, but myself. It was a very strong lesson learned.
Time marched on and I continued working Ch.7 as a writer, producer, and assignment editor and spent 13 years during the infancy of rock and the later switch to talk, much of the time as a news anchor, at WRKO. And, as you know, Jerry, perfection was an absolute key to success
Attention to detail (is that different from perfection?) is so paramount in all walks of life, even at home with the family. But, my wife believes that I’m a bit too gung-ho while she’s the complete opposite.
For example, she’ll constantly forget to turn off, say, a closet light, leaving the switch-flipping to me. So, as you can see, the issue of perfection can be a source of irritation. But, in my experience of 40 years in broadcasting, perfection leads all of us down the golden path.
My apologies for being so long-winded!
Ron