My friend was stressed. He was juggling lots of different projects. Not making as much progress as he wanted. Not clear about the relative priorities. And considering taking on even more projects.
It’s a good problem to have, opportunity. But there are only so many hours in the day.
Overfilling those hours does not end well (context switching overhead or burnout).
Letting someone else (e.g. the Panic Monster) decide your priorities also does not end well.
We all know the world of work is changing; but how exactly and what can we really do about it?
I attended the third annual World of Work conference yesterday. Here are my notes:
I reached a mini-milestone today. A simple setting change with a long history:
Like many, I’d turned off new email notifications years ago. No annoying “You have mail!” pop-ups, no sudden sounds, no nagging envelope icon, no barely-perceptible mouse cursor changes, no tiresome fade-in text, no irritating iOS badges, nada.
I was managing email on my terms. Except I wasn’t… Using my inbox as a to-do list integral to my workflow meant that I was susceptible to distractions when going in and out of the mail app. Even though I was only checking to batch process new mail three times a day (morning, lunch, evening), www.rescuetime.com (free trial) revealed the truth of my app usage.
So I’m going to experiment with pulling emails manually only three times a day from now. Why not? We’ll see…
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Update- 1st October:
Habit formed. This really works! With one adjustment:
Mac Mail users may also want to disable the nagging red count badge that lives in the doc via Mail Preferences: 
Ever find it difficult to strip down what you have to say to the bare minimum? I do. My list of draft blog posts has swelled to around 50. I need to get better at getting them out the door. While they are fresh in my mind. Minimal polishing. Idea> open wordpress> tap the keyboard> hit Publish. Next.
The danger is that it takes time to refine down ideas:
I didn’t have time to write a short letter so i’ve written a long one instead. ~Mark Twain
So I’ve started using postcards to structure my thoughts (idea pinched from this Richard Kelly talk). The space limitation is a kind of old skool version of Twitter’s 140 characters and using a pen rather than keyboard feels good.
