We’ve all been there, you sit down at your computer to do some work, keen to get some valued output happening, to finish a project or tackle an important issue. But before we know it we are sucked into that vortex of all possibility, your inbox.
This is not something that we humans used to have to worry about. In the old days, if you wanted to write to someone you did it with a pen and paper, and even if a typewriter was involved, you still had to go and post it, it still had to make its journey to its destination, get opened and then be read days later by whomever it was addressed to. Non-email written dialogue took longer, but dare I say it, it had more substance, less verbiage and more actual meeting of minds. You thought more carefully about what you were going to say because more effort was involved in saying anything much at all.
Would you bother going to the post office, signing and licking all of the stamps, paying the postage, making all that effort for each and every one of the email communications that you have these days? And if the things you are writing are so trivial or unimportant to you that you would NOT want to go to that effort, then why are you wasting your time?
Is it just curiosity that lures us into email land before we tackle the substantive issues of the day, or is it procrastination? A miss-placed sense of needing to be needed? A feeling of security? I must be important because look how many emails I receive?
It’s funny how creating convenience has created another problem. It’s like a mental swamp. Email has presented us with a new frontier for the application of self-discipline and created a new time issue to be managed.
The pressure to respond to all our mail in a timely way means we take any opportunity to pop in and see what we can quickly answer or delete. In mere seconds your mind is switching between a whole bunch of ideas and subjects, without time to clear it all out before moving onto the next batch.
If your inbox rules you, what is happening to your vision for yourself and your life? What is happening to your aspirations and objectives? Have they been buried under a mind-bending mass of paperless memos? Is your thought power being dispersed in a thousand different ways each day?
Where’s the downtime? When do we relax, what ever happened to days off? They are as important to us as oxygen, because without the opportunity to relax, get creative and do a healthy bit of day dreaming, we go stale and start to get colourless and drab in our expression of the life force.
What if this week we spend some time getting really clear about why we do what we do, and work on our vision of where we are headed. Lets put some energy into our life’s purpose and our goals, both personal and professional.
Call your spirit back, and reclaim your brain.
Shakti Durga
