E-mail is bad for you. I’ve tested this!
A couple of posts ago I talked about information overload and how to cope with it, and whilst there are various ways to overload on the old ‘info’, this subject would not be complete without giving due credit to the single biggest facilitator of information overload in the digital age: e-mail. Notice that I didn’t say culprit. It’s much to easy to blame e-mail for wasting your time, but that’s otherwise known as a shift of responsibility … and that attitude is not going to get you far in business or in life. E-mail can’t make you stop and read e-mail. Once we’ve taken responsibility for wasting time, we can actually take a look at ways to stop this from happening, or at least make it happen less often. Clear desk, clear mind A good friend of mine used to tell me that a clear desk produced a clear mind. He would clear his desk on a Friday afternoon before leaving the office, giving it a good wipe with some polisher and a cloth, and each Monday morning he would find a cle...