04.30.08
Having defined “connected time”
Well, I was goign to post about Seth Godin’s interestin Signal V’s Noise post (which is nothing to do with the excellent Signal V’s Noise blog) but then realised that I had nothing more to add to it. He’s right, spam is drowning the world (and totally and completely ineffecive for legal transactions), and with the ease of productions such as delicious, blogger, flickr, twitter, tumblr and facebook, getting you badly thought through and poorly spelled “content” out there is so easy every moron can (and does) do it. Sadly this includes me. Especially the bit about spelling.
I’ve been thinking a lot about life and work and technology (and using the word and repeatedly) for a few months now, and it occurs to me that I am too contactable.
The majority of the contact that comes through these channels is rubbish. I get a couple of personal emails a week, but (work excluded) I get a hundred emails a day. I get a couple of hundred emails a day through work, but of those I actually need to do something with about 15. I am on text message distrobution lists for work related stuff virtually every weekend, yet I have only actually got invovled once in the last few months, all the rest of the time I am mearly on edge. My RSS feed reader (Google Reader) has over a hundred feeds pouring into it, yet I end up clicking “mark as read” to a hundred unread items a couple of times a day.
With mobile email and blackberry-a-likes becoming standard in work life now, virtually everybody is contactable all the time. I have to give out my mobile number (which is no major problem), but once people start ringing you at 9pm because “it’s urgent”, this is a problem. Best advice I’ve been given in the IT inducstry came from a dope smoking ex-folk singer who was a configuration management specialist: “Do the important, not the urgent”, meaning “if you stay reactive you’ll always be battling fires”.
All of noise is starting to drive people mad. Last night a team mate sent out an email at 8pm, our boss replied at 11:30pm, and I replied at 5:45am. This is not about an emergency, or even something really important, it was about the wording of a status report. Yep, you read right. Lunacy. We’re running a 24/7 team, except without shifts or geo-colocation.
So I’m going to make myself less contactable. I’ve been de-cluttering my life for a few weeks, deleting contacts in my mobile I never ring, removing RSS feeds, dumping massive swaiths of bookmarks and one-liner files, and this is helping to reduce the inflow of information. Now I need to reclaim the time.
Possibly a separate work movile is a start, or a whitelisting feature (eg. my phone will only ring if you are a friend, or you go stright to answerphone). Then a bit of inbox filtering. If you cc me in, I’ll only be reading it once a day, when I check the cc box. With a little judicious labelling I should be able to mark up those that are actually importnat.
By de-marking my time I’m hoping to regain some sanity.
Some people would tell me (and have done) that this is “the right thing” and that work “can’t tell you to do this stuff” (eg. work all hours and be contactable at the weekends), because of some form of sense of whats right (I wrote baout that a little while ago but can’t find it to link to it), but I think you have to have gone through the phase of being completely connected and the work that goes with it to then make the decision to stop. Just dismissing it out of hand as daft proves nothing, but going through the it and deciding it’s not for you is another mattter.
Now (as MSN springs into life, and at 7:22 another team mate and I discuss how early we can ring somebody), I just need to implement it, and then work out a way to stay as productive.
Ben said,
April 30, 2008 at 11:32 am
One thing that might help with the ‘judicious labelling’ of emails is POPFile - uses Bayesian logic to sort emails into more complex boxes than ’spam’ and ‘good’. With enough training it might be able to start guessing which emails need your attention and which don’t?