by Christine Bougie | May 31st, 2010
Twyla Tharp knows what’s what. I’m endlessly inspired by her book, The Creative Habit.
After a beautiful, hot weekend spent riding my bike, running, and visiting family, this part of her book popped into my empty head:
“When I commit to a project, I don’t expand my contact with the world; it try to cut it off. I want to place myself in a bubble of monomaniacal absorption where I’m fully invested in the task at hand.
As a result, I find I’m often subtracting things from my life rather than adding them. I’ve turned that into a ritual as well. I list the biggest distractions in my life and make a pact to do without them for one week.”
~Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit
Email has been a huge distraction for me. I’ve gone through brief periods where I’ve managed it well, but I haven’t been that great at it lately. So I decided to commit to a simple email ritual for one week:
only check email at 1pm
I know it’s not as drastic as Twyla’s approach, but the thought of quitting email – even for a week – freaks me out. I’ll miss gigs! I’ll lose money! Etc, etc.
This decision is largely inspired by Gwen Bell, who probably receives a lot more email than I do and manages to check her’s at 2pm every day. (I chose 1pm because it fits my schedule a bit better.)
Other things that inspired this decision:
- This ass-kicking quote from Merlin Mann: “Great work doesn’t happen when you’re checking email.” That one hits the spot.
- This article. Particularly the part about how long it takes to regain focus after an interruption…
“But even the best-timed interruption, even the one abjectly apologised for, will disrupt our flow, which in turn will affect productivity. It’s not simply that interruptions steal time away from other projects, they also make it hard to get back to what you were doing in the first place – if you can even remember what it was. According to Mark, only 7per cent of interrupted work is resumed the same day. Even when you do manage to pick up where you left off, typically it takes an average of 25 minutes and two intervening tasks before you do.”
OK. So today is day 1.
I got through my inbox in 15 minutes at 1pm.
I hope the rest of the week is this easy. If I can do a week, then I’ll try a month.
Wish me luck!
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I LOVE email…and wait expectantly, checking several times a day, for new reports of your music and life. My patience has been rewarded with your update today…THANX !!
No, really…getting off email for a week…checking only once a day…I WANT to be in touch with people, and they know I will get right back at them if they email me. It’s part of my puttering around the house routine, and never interferes with important work…it’s the SPEED with which you quickly eliminate useless/unimportant emails that makes all the difference…make a quick decision to DELETE and move on to more important stuff..like saying HELLO to you, Christine !!
Hey Gord! Thanks for commenting. I’m envious of your ability to be on top of email during the day and that it never interferes with your important work. That’s the thing – for me, it does interfere with my important work…because I’ve let it get like that.
I agree, too, that it’s all about how quick we can make decisions about each email. One thing that I’ve found in the last few days of processing emails in one big batch is that I’m much better at making these decisions when I’m in “email zone.” Once I get on a roll, it’s easy to get through 30 emails at once. That’s just what works for me, right now anyway.
p.s. I’d love to see more of your photos…