I frikkin’ hate e-mail. I get between 60-100 e-mails a day and it’s driving me up the damned wal,l trying to keep up with all of it. About a third of what comes in is usually crap and it gets deleted right off the bat, and often labeled as spam so my e-mail program knows to not even bother me with it. But the rest of what I get has to be read, answered, filed… If I answer even just 10 of those e-mails, and take 5 minutes to answer each one, that’s almost an hour of my day dedicated to e-mail right there. This does not include the aforementioned reading and filing that still has to be done afterwards. And you know what that means. Any time spent on dealing with e-mail is time not spent on writing!
I’ve done my damnedest to cut down the flow of messages that flood my in-box daily. I’m only subscribed to those Yahoo groups that I need to belong to for professional reasons. Unfortunately, all the organizations and publishers I work with have at least two Yahoo groups to their individual names, and sometimes more than that. Then there’s the e-mails that go back and forth on individual projects. Those e-mails are all important and must be kept up with, but I’m getting so many right now. I’m starting to think maybe it’s time to scale back on my work. I mean seriously, I’m spending 1-2 hours a day on e-mail related to my work. Yes, I said 1-2 hours a day, people. Right now, I’m getting up at the ass-crack of dawn to spend two hours every day on the podcast and I’d like to spend an hour and a half in the evenings writing stories and books, but I’m struggling so hard to keep up with the fucking e-mail I can’t seem to make that schedule work.
Ugh. It’s enough to drive a person crazy. But there may be a solution. I’ve been limiting the amount of time I am allowed to spend on e-mail. I will only check and deal with e-mail during whatever hours I have free between 9 AM and 3PM during the week. By which I mean, unless I’m working out or drawing the Cynical Woman cartoon or having lunch, I’ll deal with the fucking e-mail. But come 3 PM, the e-mail gets shut down, and I will not, under any circumstances, re-open my e-mail until the next morning at 9 AM. And that’s during the week. On weekends, I will handle e-mail on Saturday for as long as I can stomach it, but on Sunday? Fuggedaboudit! No frikkin’ way am I check e-mail on Sunday.
So here’s the deal. You need to get a hold of me in the evenings, or on Sunday? You just dying to tell me something, or request something, or chit chat? You’ll have to catch me on Twitter. I’m on Twitter pretty much all day when I’m home. And I really like Twitter too. You know why?
Because tweets are limited to 140 characters, baby! And that’s a helluva lot easier to deal with the fuckin’ e-mail!
AUGH!!
