Stop Drinking from the Outlook Food Bowl

June 23, 2007

With the recent popularity of the book 4 Hour Work Week, by Tim Ferris, there has been some talk about various entreprenuers re-thinking the way they structure their business lives. One of the overriding points of the book is outsourcing and the power of hiring virtual assistants. But, another point of the book was cutting down on information overload.

So many of us in this business suffer from information overload. We have emails coming in constantly. We subscribe to a bunch of RSS feeds. We have people calling us and/or sending us instant messages. If you follow the news, then you got even more crap on top of all of that. That’s an awful lot of input and it can divide your attention in a big way. I have several email accounts all coming into Outlook and, until recently, I had it set such that it would download new messages automatically every 5 minutes. Not only that, it would play an audible sound whenever I got messages. So, while I’m working on something, I hear these sounds from my computer. I know its an email, and more often than not, my curiosity gets the best of me and I interrupt myself to scan over Outlook to see if anything interesting came in.

Information overload!

So, one of the first things I have done is turned OFF the automatic downloads of emails. By doing that ONE simple action, I now concentrate all my time on actual work. Then, a few times per day, I will go download all my email and deal with all of it right there, at one sitting. Then, move on - not to check the email again for some time. Tim Ferris says to check email twice per day to start, one at 12pm and once at 4pm. The exact times you choose are up to you, however the philosophy behind it is solid. Stop letting your email interrupt you from real production. Trust me, people can wait.

Same with phone calls. I think my next step is to turn OFF my ringer and have everybody just leave voice mails. Then, I will return all important calls at one sitting. I want to be easily contacted, but I also want to maintain control over my own communication lines. I get people calling me for various reasons and if I just stop and deal with them as they come in, my entire work flow is interrupted. No good.

Advice