BREAK YOUR E-MAIL ADDICTION

Are you addicted to your e-mail? Don't be like this guy.

It's difficult not to check your e-mail several dozen to several hundred times a day. It automatically refreshes every 30 seconds or a minute, depending on your settings. Also, when a majority of your contact with the professional world is via e-mail, it makes you long for responses.

One way to avoid checking e-mail is simply to be out of e-mail range for an hour. Run errands, meet a friend for lunch, accidentally drop your BlackBerry; these are all viable options with obvious degrees of cost.

If you can't live without, at least leave your e-mail open in the toolbar on your desktop and let the auto refresh do it's job. In other words, don't look for messages unless you get an alert. After that, make yourself wait a few minutes to peek who has written you. Then, it will be like Christmas several times a day.

THIS PHONE IS NOT IN SERVICE



We live in an e-mail driven world. Your phone has morphed into a device that is primarily useful as mobile e-mail. The truncated 'this message sent from a BlackBerry' has become ubiquitous.

I suprised an editor this morning when I called her to see if she had any upcoming special features. This brief and polite conversation should turn into an assignment by the end of the week. It sped up what has taken months by e-mail. I only called because we have spoken on the phone before and this particular editor is not good at responding to e-mail questions.

But sometimes it never hurts to pick up the phone because it at least forces editors to give definitive answers. So, dial that editor you've been waiting to hear from...just don't be creepy.