A Daily Waste of Time

During the often referred to 27-year gig I put the company on the email track long before our vendors and customers.  There was considerable executive talk about "who asked for this,"  "how much did this cost" and all the other standard questions asked by those maintaining the status quo.

By 2005 or so I started to think about collaboration opportunities as the limitations of email became apparent.  Certainly many of the social media and collaboration tools have shown their benefits.  People have trouble changing.  By 2009 I'd dropped most print publications focusing on digital forms, quickly moving to content pulled by me rather than pushed.

Despite that change I found myself sludging through a lot of email which was increasingly of little value.  Today I have at least six or eight email accounts only two or three of which are used.  I've understood the weaknesses now for almost a decade but still spend time daily looking through my inbox.

Gmail has good spam filters.  Today I received an email from someone letting me know that the federal program to which I'd applied (I'd not) was no longer available but I could call.  Uh huh.  I learned the unwise use of Groupon and the knockoffs but still get three of those a day.  Despite a respite from gardening in 2015 I get four emails daily offering 'deals that won't last.'  The New York Times sends me a dozen emails daily on topics I'm sure to like.  It takes me a lot of time each day to ignore or delete the messages that I don't even want to receive.

I do like to receive Seth Godin's emails.  A recent issue spoke about all the great podcasts but how there were becoming so many that it was impractical to listen.  I cannot even get on any kind of schedule to watch Ted Talks.  It goes without saying that I've also 'Liked' so many things on Facebook that any contact with real friends there is lost just as it is in email.  With texting and snail mail and electronic feeds, email, etc., I'm pretty much working full time without even having a job.

About twenty years ago I  made a conscious decision to cut back on TV news, some newspapers and a bunch of print magazines; it was all too much.  Now I want to be informed, to learn and to grow but it's time to revisit the digital intake.  No one is going to starve moving from a tablespoon to a teaspoon.