The Lure of Email
I don’t spend much time or energy anticipating the regular mail. It is delivered once per day, so once per day I go collect it and spend a couple minutes sorting the pile. Email is different. It is delivered as often as it is sent. I constantly wonder if something new has arrived in my mailbox, so I take a minute to click and check. Sometimes I do this even if I checked my mailbox only minutes ago. Any time I wander near my computer, I check email. Sometimes when I’m nowhere near my computer I wonder if new email has arrived and so I run and check. This means I’m checking email a number of times per day that is firmly in the double digit range. Most of the time the checking is pointless because nothing new has arrived, but while I’m clicking things anyway I’ll check livejournal and a couple of forums, neither of which have anything new either because I checked them the last time I checked email too. All the clicking results in the loss of 15-20 minutes that could have been spent on something useful.
So yesterday I tried an experiment. During the times of day when I’m supposed to be focused on house and kids, I turned my computer off completely. This way I could not fool myself into believing that it would only take a few seconds to glance at email. I got a lot more stuff done around the house than I have in recent weeks. And when I came back to the computer I found a batch of email that I could manage effectively in a little block of time. Amazingly, my email does not go bad if it sits unnoticed for an extra hour or two. I’m going to be turning my computer off much more frequently for the next few weeks. The kids are home and they need a mommy who will read stories and make cookies.