On a visit to the Download Squad earlier I chanced upon this video of a Google Tech Talk by Merlin Mann, creator of the popular 43 folders website.
Rather than send you a click further away I’ve hosted a copy of it here if you have an hour to spend.
He is quite a charismatic speaker and my hour was soon over. I specially liked his reference to rss feeds when he suggests both feeds and email tend to suck the time out of our days. I for one am seriously thinking of just reading my email and feeds just a few times per day and actually doing stuff the rest of the day. There again I’m a very good procrastinator in search of disciplined ways of getting things done.
Came across an interesting article earlier that I must share with you. Here is an extract.
More than any other medium in the world, the time commitment difference between sender and receiver is huge. For instance, if you call me on the phone and we chat for 10 minutes, that’s 10 minutes of your time and 10 minutes of my time. If you write me a handwritten letter and I write you one back, that’s maybe 30 minutes of your time and 30 minutes of my time. If we exchange text messages, that’s 10 seconds from you and 10 seconds from me. But with email, often times the sender will ask two or three open-ended one sentence questions which elicit multi-paragraph answers. In these cases, the sender spends one minute and the receiver is asked, implicitly, to spend maybe an hour.
(Mike Davidson [here is the original post])
Now in my case if you send me a text message it may take you 10 seconds but it will take me minutes. Sign me up to the text messaging challenged group.
Be sure to read the article. Now maybe I’ll translate his web response to French.