Even on a recent three week trip to China, I was able to gain Internet access everywhere we stayed, so you’d figure a recent jaunt to the Feast of the Geek, CES 2008, I’d be constantly connected. Well, I was unplugged for 36 hours…
How in the world could a Geek unplug for 36 hours? It’s really quite simple, you get sick. In addition to getting sick and not being able to get across the room to my Treo or laptop, my Blackberry started rebooting constantly when receiving traffic. There I was, all alone in a Vegas hotel room with no connection to the outside world except for CNN… and they seemed to forget about the rest of the world except for the damn New Hampshire primaries.
36 hours equals roughly 550 new emails to my various email accounts (CES vendors probably accounted for about 300 more than usual), but you know what… nothing broke and there were no emergencies that others couldn’t handle! Interesting considering I had just finished reading The 4-Hour Workweek and Tim Ferriss mentioned that he checks email once a week even though he is CEO of a successful company. Perhaps the Percocet is talking, but do we really need to check email every five minutes or, god forbid all the time?
I’ve decided to experiment into automating portions of my email by properly using gmail and Outlook to hopefully save time. Stay tuned for hopefully some good tricks and tips to saving time (and sanity) by automating your email as I experiment.