There is a lot of talk in our society about finding balance in life. For me, sometimes, it seems like there is so much pressure and focus on this topic that I have to have everything in perfect balance every moment of every day and, if I don’t, I’m failing. Often, this perceived failure causes me to end up even more out of balance as I try to drop what I’m doing to fix the imbalance which, inherently, causes more imbalance. If you’ve ever seen the I Love Lucy episode where they are working on the factory line, yep, sometimes it feels just like that!
E-mail is a wonderfully wicked mistress of sorts. The efficiency with which you can communicate certain concepts, without the invasiveness of things like phone calls and instant messages, is amazing. However, e-mail has also become a bit of a behemoth to manage with the overall volume of legitimate e-mail along with spam, being cc’d on threads that have no relation to you and much more. The principles of time management apply to all areas of our life but, for many, e-mail is a great place to apply these as we usually handle a higher volume of information in our e-mail than anywhere else. If we can figure out how to be organized and effectively manage our time with e-mail, I have found that the principles apply in other areas as well.
