The fine art of catching up
Getting back online means having lots of stuff to catch up on. The obviously screaming inbox is one of them, reading another. Not counting work (wether it is blogging, designing or something else), that’s what I need to catch up on.
E-mail is my primary mean of communication. Being away for almost two weeks leaves me with a lot of spam and newsletter cleaning in my inbox (although filters help a lot) and 200 or so e-mails marked urgent reply needed. That’s a whole days work at least, so I’ll try and trim it down to 50 e-mails a day, and also take some extra time to get rid of the ones where a short reply is enough. Marking you e-mail with labels to help you prioritize is a good way to relieve you of some stress. Labels like urgent reply needed, research first and in due time will help a lot if you like me receive a lot of mail. I also label my e-mail after what project they correspond to. That will help me to find all the urgent reply needed e-mails that belongs to a certain design gig. Unfortunately I’ve been sloppy with my labeling so I have my work cut out for me…
The other thing I always need to catch up on is my reading. I write about a lot of things professionally so I can’t afford not staying up to date in various topics. For my day to day reading I use RSS feeds, like most bloggers I guess, but when the feedreader says 100+ unread posts and you know it’s really more like 1000+ you have to prioritize. Feeds are great for staying in the loop, but when you’re outside of it, go visit the sites! I’m choosing a few at a time and scan through their posts, following as few links as possible since I don’t really have time to continues reading. Opening in tabs in Firefox really helps here. I used to powersurf with several browsers before, with their own set of tabs per topic so to speak, but I find that this increases the risk of crashes and since you don’t want to backtrack more than necessary this method isn’t recommended.
Finally, I probably need to talk to a lot of people. Short stuff can be sorted out via e-mail or IM, but if I fire up Adium at this point I won’t be getting any reading or e-mailing done, so it’s Skype or nothing. Sometimes I even revert to the old school telephone, although I still haven’t got one installed here…
All in all, catching up online is stressful, time consuming and sometimes tedious. Still, it needs to be done so do try to make it as easy on yourself as possible when presented with the situation. Like I do.