Letter Never Sent Tell me when to go.

Life requires a lot of work, and it’s a lot easier if you waste less energy. Like many of you, I am always on the look out for good ways to make things work better, so I can spend more time doing things I enjoy. Here are a few concepts that have helped me improve the way I do things:

1. Get up early: It’s hard to get out of bed early, but it’s easier if you go to sleep early. This is probably the hardest part, especially if you’re naturally a night owl or living with a night owl. Even though it feels a little strange to be up before other people, I have found that it adds a lot of benefit. For your entire day you are ahead of the pack. You get the best parking spots, the line at the coffee shop is shorter, traffic is lighter, you’re replying to email before everyone else, you go to lunch earlier and miss the rush, and you can go home earlier without feeling like a slacker. Not only does this help you stay on top of things but everyone else who comes in later starts to look a little more like a slacker. Early morning is also a good time to plan your day and make lists of all the things you need to take care of. If you work in an office, it’s also easier to get things done before everyone else comes in and starts chatting it up. Now, some people like to come in extra late to avoid the herd and this works pretty well, but I find that in the early morning you often have more time to react to situations, like the server going down overnight, for example. This is harder if you roll in at 10-10:30am with your voicemail and email inbox full of messages.
2. Funnel everything into one email box: I used to spend several minutes a day logging into various email accounts, dialing into my voicemail to stop the light from flashing, etc. Now I forward all 5-6 of my email accounts (with the exception of my work email address) to my gmail account or I check my email and download into Gmail (Gmail lets you check up to 5 POP email accounts). For faxes I have an Efax account. For voicemail my messages are forwarded as .wav files and are not stored in the voicemail system. For any account statements these are also forwarded to email, so I receive less actual mail.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 4th, 2007 at 4:31 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.