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Why I've decided to battle my 13 year email addiction
publication date: Apr 18, 2008
Hi
I'm feeling REALLY uncomfortable . . . My skin is itching, I'm getting hot and cold flushes and butterflies in my stomach . . . I've decided to face up to my worst addiction! To conquer it means making a radical change in the way I live and work. You see, there's one thing that I do each day that I know is reducing my effectiveness and wasting precious time that could be better spent elsewhere . . . Let me confess this to you now - I've been addicted to email for 13 years! I can't go more than 10 minutes without checking my inbox. I have been religiously checking my inbox every few minutes throughout the day for years. It has become an ingrained part of my working day. It has become so automatic I don't even think about how much time it actually takes up and whether it is actually a good use of my time. It certainly breaks my concentration. Even though I may be trying to write or read a report, I unconsciously end up clicking my send/receive button and wait for the new mail to pop up. I read somewhere that if you break your concentration from a project, it can take at least another 7 minutes before you can regain your train of thought. OK, so the majority of my business is conducted by email. I mean I'm sending this email to you right now and I am a huge advocate of eletters! Email really is a marvellous tool for keeping in touch. But it is also a curse - perhaps the greatest single distraction of the modern world. So starting this morning I have gone email cold turkey and will not look at an email until noon. I'm going to check my emails just twice a day (rather than the 50 or so times normally!). Once at noon and then again at 4pm. This is to make sure I get the most responses from the previous emails sent. Even now (it's just after 11:00am) I'm getting itchy. I have to consciously resist grabbing my mouse and opening up my yahoo account to see how many more emails have come in. What has caused this change? Well, I woke very early this morning (4:30am) and rather than lie in bed and stare at the ceiling I went downstairs and started reading a new book - The 4 Hour Work Week (Escape The 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join The New Rich) by Timothy Ferriss. This has been a New York Times bestseller over in the US and has just been published over here to great acclaim. In a nutshell, it gives specific techniques to leverage your time and actually achieve more by doing less. Tim's belief is that it is not the money that we all crave, but the freedom and mobility that usually accompanies greater wealth but without the bonds of working silly hours. Anyway, as part of this grand plan, Tim looks at time management and urges the reader to strip away the unnecessary distractions - with email being an obvious first choice. As Tim says, 'The most important actions are never comfortable . . . there is a direct correlation between an increased sphere of comfort and getting what you want'. How true! Stepping beyond what feels comfortable in life allows us to take risks and form new experiences. It can help us to become more confident of stepping into the unknown. And as we are seeking new ways of making money, that journey is not always going to be easy, so surely it's better to prepare ourselves - to become more assertive without burning bridges, to find solutions instead of problems, to be proactive rather than reactive. So what can you do today that makes you feel uncomfortable? Tim has some wonderfully bizarre challenges that include: - Eye gazing: practice looking at strangers in the eye until THEY break contact - Get phone numbers: being sure to maintain eye contact, ask for the phone numbers of at least two attractive members of the opposite sex! (Alas, Heloise has banned me from this one!) - Say 'no' to all requests for 2 days - Stop asking for opinions and propose solutions instead - And my personal favourite . . . Lie down in the middle of a crowded public space for about ten seconds and then get up and continue what you were doing before as if nothing had happened! The book goes into a lot more detail with techniques to make these a little easier. Highly recommended! ************************ Have you checked out the Ultimate FX Predictor yet? ************************ Launched last Friday it has been the most popular thing I have ever done. In fact we ran out of copies within 24hrs! Thankfully we have now managed to get new sets in. Anyway, as I thought, the glowing testimonials are already starting to come in . . . Paul Wilson wrote: "I have received your TUFXP and have watched the CD's in one go, I found them very easy to understand and was ready to go the following morning. So, I dipped my toe in the water (with caution) for the first time Wednesday, a cautious 10 points. This morning, another (very quick) cautious 14 points - and at the time of writing it's moved another 30+ points. I have traded Forex before, but could get bogged down in too many technical indicators - this comes as a refreshing change, I guess that's why I was so cautious . . . how could something so 'simple' work without all those complicated indicators - long may it continue!" And WH told me: "In the last week . . . (well only four days to be accurate) I have a real excitement burning within me! 13 trades followed with 10 winning giving a very big 151 pip plus . . . and this was with no real effort . . . magnificent!" If you want to see what is causing all this excitement, just click on this link: http://www.on2url.com/app Righto, must dash. It's almost noon now and I can't wait to open my inbox and get my email fix! ;-) Nick |
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