Mox Nox In Rem

Email-free Christmas (Part III)

In my last couple of posts, I have talked about my “de-mailing” over Christmas, and it was hard, then easy, but ultimately rewarding.

What was the process that enabled this to happen?  There were three things:

1. Path of Least Resistance.  In “The Happiness Advantage”, Shawn Achor talks about “the path of least resistance.”  He says that he pondered why he never practised guitar.  It was just too much effort to get it out of the cupboard.  Not a lot of effort, but too much.  So, he changed things, and kept it in his living room, right by the sofa.  This small change made a massive difference to the frequency of his practice.  It almost became difficult not to pick the guitar up.  So, if we want to develop a good habit, put it on our daily path, in our field of vision.  And the reverse is true.  If we want to stop doing something, make it hard to start.  So I moved the Mail icon from the toolbar on my iPad and buried it in a folder in a folder on page 3.  It wasn’t impossibly difficult to get in there and look at email, but it was certainly inconvenient.  After a while, I forgot about it, because I didn’t see it every day.
2. Clear “Out of Office” message.  My email OoO reply said “I will be away until 6 January 2014 and unavailable by phone and email until that date.”  Pretty clear, I thought.  No-one complained about its directness.
3. Clear voicemail message.  My voicemail message said “I am out of the office until 6th January.  If your call relates to a work matter, please don’t leave a voicemail, but call back on 6th January.  If it is a personal matter, please leave a voicemail and I will get back to you.”  Again, direct.  But no-one complained, and a few people called back on the 6th January.

The point of all this is that you have to create the fire-break.  If you fail to clear a good gap between you and the flames of distraction, those flames will jump over and spoil your holiday.  I managed to clear the firebreak, and it worked.

 

Return to Vinyl, Part I - The Why?

So the CDs are in Oxfam in Shaftesbury, if you want them.  Actually, the first four hundred went to Oxfam in Earl’s Court in 2011.  They won’t be missed, or not much.  But the last, loved, hundred? Perhaps.  The copy of Led Zeppelin IV owned, I guess, since 1986?  It has a heft and solidity that most of the others lack.  Not musically, I mean.  Although that too, or course.  But the thing itself.  Physically.  Later, CDs seemed to just get flimsier and flimsier, until they became MP3s.  And then they didn’t weigh anything at all.  Anyway, it’s gone.

The catalyst for all this?  As I have mentioned before, on MP3 or CD most of the music is not there.  Digitally, 95% of the musical information disappears between the original sound recording and the MP3.  And 75% disappears on the transition to a normal CD track.  I wouldn’t mind, but (a) I have paid for all the music, and (b) the missing bit may be the most interesting bit.

So, back to the future.  Back to vinyl.  Why?

First, as noted above, in the move from analogue to digital to CD, too much of the musical context has been lost.  Second, too much of the sensory immersive experience has been lost too.  Irrespective of the actual quality of the sound, I see too large a gulf between (a) hitting a button on the iPad and (b) pulling an album from the rack; sliding the inner sleeve from the cover (oh, look, here are the lyrics on the inner sleeve, and some cool art and words on the sleeve), feeling the weight of the disc in my hands; but be careful not to touch the surface; then slotting it onto the turntable spindle.  Hit the start button.  Unhook the tone-arm, place the stylus in position.  Lower the tone-arm.  The hiss (run-in groove) and the click on to the sound track.  Then, always, the first note.

So, you see, I miss all of that.

So, back to vinyl.

 

Email-free Christmas (Part II)

In my last post, I talked about the results of dodging email for 2.5 weeks from 18th December to 6th January, and how I concluded that most email was pretty pointless.  That may be obvious, but what was not obvious, in advance of the exercise, were the psychological benefits of what I am now calling “de-mailing”.

The first phase was hard.  Like a smoker separated from his tobacco by statute or family intervention, I felt like a stimulant had been withdrawn.  I suppose it had.

But after a couple of days, I forgot all about it.  I had put in places arrangements (see next post), so that anyone could get hold of me in the event that anything important happened.  But no-one called.  Nothing important happened.  It rarely does.

The more distanced I became from the world of email faffery, the more I enjoyed my holiday.  I did things that I didn’t think I would do, and I thought things that I wouldn’t have thought if I had been caught up in the hamster/wheel interface of normal short-cycle electronic thought processes.

The next post will outline the three key steps for de-mailing over the holidays.

Email-free Christmas (Part I)

One of the joys of being a Productivity Ninja is that we occasionally - very occasionally - get the opportunity to conduct cruel and unnecessary experiments on ourselves.  These tend to be in the domain of Productivity.

So I thought I would give it a go over Christmas.  The objective was to avoid all interaction with email from close of business on 18th December until start of play on 6th January - a good 2.5 weeks.  At the end of the period, I would have a look at what I had missed out on, analyse the figures, and conclude.

This should be easy for a Ninja, right?  Wrong.  We’re all the same.  We’re all slightly addicted to the feeling that someone, somewhere on this grey planet, wants to get in touch.  So, yes, it was hard.  But it was also interesting.

In my next post I will reveal the Top Tips that enabled me to virtually forget about email for two weeks.  But for now, here’s the analysis of what landed in that period, broadly categorised:

		No.	%
Commercial/Junk		93	43%
FYIs		79	37%
30-second scan/discard		28	13%
Small actions		13	6%
Important Actions		3	1%
Total		216	100%

Of the 216 emails I received...

43% was junk - “Merry Christmas!”, “Our Christmas Sale starts Monday!”  Have you ever noticed how few sentences ending with an exclamation mark ever contain anything to exclaim about?

37% was just CC stuff; things people thought that I needed to know about.  I can’t recall what any of things were, so those people were probably wrong.

13% was from people who wanted me to do something but, on reflection, I decided against doing so.

6% was things worth doing, but only took a minute or so...

...and 1% (three emails in total) were important things.

So, what can I conclude form all this.  Three things:

1. We massively overstate the import of things that come to us via email.  Most of it is crap.
2. As a result of 1 above, we spend too much time in fidgety, short-cycle, email-focussed behaviour.
3. As a result of 2, we are failing to do the big-picture, patient, valuable work.