Share this page
Quick links
Add feed
|
|
The Persuader
My personal blog, started in 2006. No paid or guest posts, no link sales.
Posts tagged ‘time management’
07.06.2021

Iâm not exactly proud of this, but last month I finished replying to all my emails from 2005.
That year I was stuck in Auckland for an extra day due to the airport there being fogged in. I said to another traveller, âWell, I wonât catch up on emails now till the end of the year.â He looked at me as though I was kidding. Except I was being unduly optimistic since it took 16 years to finish replying to everyone.
Today I replied to the last one from 2006, and fortunately, the AOL address appears to be current.
I feel like Iâm Ringo Starr in that early Simpsons episode who insisted on replying to all his Beatles fan mail personally, even though it was now the 1990s.
I never had the quantity he had, but the pattern wasnât particularly healthy: new emails would come in, Iâd have to reply to those, and non-urgent ones got pushed up the inbox.
These old emails were actually very nice and courteous ones, so they werenât of subjects or by writers whom I was trying to avoid.
The writer of the first one had since retired but I still tracked him down to apologize, as I have done with the second who, as far as I can tell, remains active.
I felt that at the least they deserved the courtesy of a reply, even if my timing was lousy.
Why am I blogging about this? Probably to tell others not to follow my example. And to get off social media, which Iâm sure eventually played a part in further delays. Why poke about on some tiny phone keyboard when you can structure your day better with a desktop machine and type more efficiently?
I have some fond memories of dial-up and not being constantly connected because you planned the emails you needed to send out. Your imagination could be fuelled by your offline time. We have to make the decision to get offline and take responsibility for how we spend our time. I suspect that is what I am rediscovering these days, including reading paper books more than I used to. Iâm sure thereâs a resurgence of printed matter lying in wait as people tire of the division and mindlessness of some of the most popular websites on our planet right now. And itâll be the trendy young people, those who see from our example what a waste of time these sites are, whoâll drive it.
Tags: 2000s, 2005, 2006, 2021, business, email, internet, online, time management, youth Posted in business, culture, internet, technology | No Comments »
29.02.2020
Itâs true. I spent time on business development, answering emails, doing tech stuff on our sites, and generally kept on top of things. I often wonder if I would have become an active Facebooker or Tweeter had they been invented and come into my orbit in, say, 2002. We all may have been too busy with our own ventures. The fact they surfaced (for me) in 2007, and became part of my routine the following year as the economy slowed canât be a coincidence. Instagram, in 2012, also falls into this period. I convinced myself that these social media would provide some advantage, or bring opportunities that otherwise couldnât be readily located elsewhere, but that wasnât the case. Like Linkedin, Iâm not sure if any of these websites have brought work opportunities that resulted in an invoice.
Once you fall out of the habit, then the device itself isnât that useful, either, for someone who never really embraced the cellphone as a primary means of communicationâI maintained a landline all these years. I never even had a regular cellphone number till 2006: I got people to call my colleagues who did carry them (I was paying for the damned things, after all). Iâm not sure I want to be contactable in my waking hours that readily. Iâll take work calls in my office, thank you, and personal calls elsewhere; and if Iâm out, then Iâm driving or meeting with someone, and neither is a good time to be interrupted. The landline has this amazing feature called an answerphone, and it records and plays back messages when I’m good and ready to hear them.
Since Dad passed, thereâs one fewer need to be contactable day and night, and realistically I only see it as something that other members of my family and close friends should reach me on now. The number has never appeared on a single business card of mine, for good reason. As we head into the 2020s Iâm hoping each of us decides where lines should be drawn. I think mineâs right here: no more cellphones for work; at best, they’re a last resort. I need to organize my schedule better and cellphones just donât help, apps even less so. It comes back to this crazy belief of mine that technology is here to serve us, not the other way round. By all means, if your cellphone serves you, then use itâI can think of countless professions where it is a must. But for the rest of us, it’s a relief not to be burdened with it.

Tags: 2000s, 2010s, 2020, 2020s, business, cellphone, Facebook, history, Instagram, LinkedIn, Meizu, social media, technology, time management, Twitter Posted in business, technology | 1 Comment »
|