Notes to Self

Email Deluge

If email is not a problem for you, I would not bother to read on. Go spend your fruitful time elsewhere.

It is annual report/performance review time at my job. I am looking back and completing a rough accounting of all the things I accomplished (or not) last year. Where did all that time and energy go? Out of morbid curiosity, I did some very rough calculations on the amount of time I spent on work related email. I am horrified by the results.

8,500 received

3,200 sent

(These numbers are rounded down by 5% for possible error or duplication and comprise work related email only. This is not a scientific analysis nor pretends to be.)

OK, so we’ll look at an extremely rough calculation on this:

Let’s say I spent an average of 5 minutes writing each of these 3,200 emails. (Obviously, some took seconds and some I slaved over, but 5 minutes is probably a reasonable average.) That equals about 267 hours or 6.75 forty-hour work-weeks of responding to work related emails. (This figure does not include reading the ones received - I work in academia - academics are not known for their brevity.)

The numbers are ugly. I am unable to bring myself to scrutinize this further in order to estimate the real time involved in all aspects of this communication. This is not the way I want to spend my life or my work. This is not the way I want the people I work with to spend their time. It is time for me to step away from the machine(s). My machine driven life is out of control. I am complicit. I am addicted. This is NOT how I want to spend the second half of my life.

So, here’s my resolution for 2012: to live in my body – to detach from the machine (as much as possible within the confines of my career requirements.) It doesn’t help that my livelihood depends on the machine, BUT how much work can I do without it? How much time can I spend without it? How many of these emails actually require a response? How many emails are truly critical for me to send? How can I build borders and boundaries around the reading and response to email?

I’m not looking for “Inbox Zero” or to be more efficient with email communication – I’m striving for less – less reading, less writing, less processing. Just less. Much less. The goal is more flesh presence (I like being in the room with you); more creative work; more book reading; more writing; more time in real life, in the real world, in real dimensions. Yes, I’ve read all the articles on email management and I was GTD long before it was the hip-geek thing to be (I took my first workshop with David Allen when I was 25 – and that was 25 years ago.) No, this about email abstinence, detox and mindfulness. This is not about being more organized. It is about leveling up the mind, body and spirit. This is about no longer participating in the insanity.

In an effort to conserve my time and energy and my colleague’s time and energy, I hereby vow to respond to fewer emails, to send fewer emails and to proselytize to the congregation until every damn one of you is converted. So, when you see me next week and ask me if I received your email, the answer is “yes.” I just didn’t think it was worth my time or yours to respond.

Special Edition of PB’s Newsy News

Here is the special Summer 2010 issue of PB’s Newsy News from Oslo, Norway. (450kb PDF) Remember, it is written and created in one day, so please forgive the grammar and spelling. :)

The Christmas Newsletter

There is a holiday tradition in the USA of the Christmas Newsletter. I used to think it was quite cheesy, but over time I have found myself enjoying the ones we receive so much that I have reconsidered the form. Here is my take on it. Perhaps this will become an annual thing even after we return... I can’t commit. Again, please forgive the typos - I crank these things out in less than a day.

Special Holiday Edition of PB’s Newsy News (360kb pdf)

Notes from a very busy December

The past three weeks have sped by in a blur. The speed effect has to do with the amount of travel, obligations and deadlines that packed my schedule. It all started with midterm grant report deadlines on December 1 and then meetings, presentations and seminars at UiO and AHO on the 3rd and 4th. A restful Friday, then a Juleverksted* (Christmas workshop) with friends on Saturday and off to Volda to meet with Torill on Sunday. After two days of a seminar in Volda, I flew back and the next day attended the Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony. In between all these events, I received notice that a journal article I had written was being emailed for revisions and I had just over a week to turn it around. December 11th involved laundry, packing, gift wrapping and package mailing (to Virginia) before we left to take the Ship to Copenhagen. While in Copenhagen I got news that a conference proposal that I had submitted in late November had been accepted. We returned from Copenhagen Sunday, December 14th and I hit the ground running on article writing and final Christmas preparations. Done and Done. Phew! School is out and we are all three officially on holiday. The only thing left to do is the grocery shopping for the Christmas celebrations.

In the background of all this, B’s mom has been very ill and my mom has just had her 4th surgery on her hip. It’s going to be a strange holiday this year and we are planning as many social engagements as possible to keep from getting homesick and fretting too much.

*Juleverksted: any combination of making cookies, cards, presents, wrapping, or festive foods, etc.

Worry Knot

I think I’m finally putting my finger on it. I have been experiencing an on again off again anxiety since our trip to Italy. I have been dismissing it as basic displacement, but I think it is more complicated than that. In that time, I have been glued to the US newspapers and news sites, reading every item on the collapse of the economy and the 2008 election. The Fulbright organizations are thorough and clear, in their forms and orientation materials, about the ups and downs that scholars go through in their moves to other countries. They are also specific on the process and methods of extracting scholars from countries that enter into civil war or a similar crisis. There wasn’t anything in the documents about crisis in your own country, or state, or neighborhood. We simply look on from afar.

The news for New Haven is bleak. As our current Mayor said, when the state of Connecticut gets a cold, New Haven gets pneumonia. Right now it looks like Connecticut has a cold that is becoming a sinus infection. My friends and family are OK. No one is losing their house or job, yet (that I know of…) But their businesses are affected and I worry. Our bank and mortgage company have changed hands and I worry. We are 10 days away from the most important election in decades and I worry. Transition to another country is difficult for all members of my family and I worry. Just taking a family of three to the movies here is about $100 and I worry.

I also think about Dad. We are approaching the one year anniversary of his death and it occupies my mind. I’m glad that I will be far away at Thanksgiving. I need the distance and solitude to process this grief.

So here’s my strategy: A total news fast. I don’t know if it will help or work, but it will free up a goodly chunk of time that I can use for something else (yoga, meditation, art, cleaning…) I also plan to have a really good cry. Maybe now.

Train Travel

I spent the weekend in a haunted house. Well, not so much “spooky haunted” as “sentimental haunted.” A. and I took the train down to Virginia last weekend. We stayed in the room that was my father’s – the room that he spent much of the last two years of his life in and the room in which he died. All the pictures in the house look different to me now. When I look at pictures of my father as a child or a young man, I have a completely different view of them. Gazing upon these images brings feelings to the surface ranging from sadness to fear – sadness that he is no longer here and fear that is brought on by the recognition of my own mortality.

I am shifted into an alternate existence when I visit the place I was raised – like a planet in retrograde moving backwards through space and time, reflecting, reminiscing, and losing myself completely in memory. We got back on Monday. It was a long train journey with delays from Virginia to Connecticut. It has taken me two days to readjust – two days to move back to the point I was located before I left. I am here...

Just three and a half weeks until A. and I leave for Norway and there are 1 million tasks undone.