Sunday, January 20, 2013

E-mail bankruptcy

There's a lot of appeal to the idea of declaring e-mail bankruptcy.

The notion is this. When you get so many e-mails in your inbox, and you get so far behind in answering your e-mails that it seems hopeless to ever catch up, consider declaring e-mail bankruptcy.

E-mail bankruptcy is the same idea as financial bankruptcy but it's only about your e-mail obligations. You can get a fresh start. You can start your e-mail life over again.  And maybe next time you'll do better.

To declare e-mail bankruptcy, send an e-mail out to everybody on your address list. Tell them that because of unfortunate circumstances you have been forced to declare e-mail bankruptcy which means that you are asking to be forgiven for not having returned e-mails that have been sent to you in the past. You have no hope of returning all those e-mails. You need a fresh start. And your fresh start is to delete all those old e-mails and start again with an empty inbox.

When your collection of unanswered e-mails gets large enough, the fact is you have no hope of answering all of of them. The only reasonable way out is to be forgiven for the obligations. It's better than suicide, and less permanent.

Posted at 10:38 AM (permalink) 0 Comments View/Leave Comment
Keywords: email bankruptcy

Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Start small

Here it is, New Year's Day. I've been meaning to get back to blogging for a while. Today seems like a good day for new beginnings.

What's been holding me back? I've been busy but probably a more significant impediment is the idea of re-committing to blogging. They say that when your goal is (or seems) too large, your amygdala (lizard brain) kicks in with a fear response...it has been called the amygdala hijack. And the fear response might be enough to make up excuses not to pursue the goal. So start small, under the radar of the lizard brain.

So I did.

Happy New Year!

Posted at 11:41 AM (permalink) 0 Comments View/Leave Comment
Keywords: continuous improvement