Women at work and their tips, challenges, advice, complaints, and experiences

I have always admitted that I love to hate technology.  As fascinating and alluring as I find the Internet, and as helpful as it is considering it allows me to work from home, I find the 'Net and my computer to big time wasters.  Okay - not just big; HUGE!

That's why Yvonne Russell's post over at SmallBizMentor today caught my eye.  She asks "can you give up email for one day?"  My response is a heartfelt YES!!!!!

In fact, this is one of the steps I've tried to take over the past few months.  You may have noticed that I rarely post on the weekends now.  I started popping into my email via my cell phone, just to check for any urgent issues (and there haven't been any yet!).  That leaves my laptop turned OFF, for the most part.  And now I'm weaning myself down to not even checking email that way on the weekends.

The only problem I've run into so far is feeling overwhelmed with email and e-zines and sale announcements and spam and, well, you get the point, on Mondays.  So during the month of April I decided to take my purge a step further: when I go into my inbox I immediately search out any spam headers that made it past my filter, and I mark them and transfer them to the spam file.  Then I mark any e-zines and other automated emails I've signed up for and just delete them.  Unless the subject line is absolutely enthralling, I don't even skim them any more.  I skim what's left and a lot of *that* gets deleted too.  I've even stopped responding to any email from a friend or colleague that is just a brief thank you or better yet, a you're welcome.  If I've thanked you, and you've said you're welcome - we're done chatting for the time being.  It cuts down on my wasted time and yours too.  (So now some of you might have a better idea of why I've responded less.  No, I'm not mad at you.  I just realized I have things to do - and so do you!)

As time goes on, I plan to pop into one or two of those automated emails a day and unsubscribe from them.  That should help matters in the end, but at first I was just trying to stop wasting so much time reading email!  Slowly but surely I'm working my way to spending my work time writing, not reading.

Shocking, that.

So, here's the question: could you give up email for just one day a week?  Would you need to start with one day a month?  Or have you already implemented this at home or at work?  

Has your company started doing an internal "no email day" promotion?  What about no work email on weekends?  

We all have a lot on our plates and something has to give.  As much fun as emailing and social media sites can be (don't even get me started on THOSE - I think I'm the last of about 50 hold-outs who don't twitter, FaceBook, MySpace, or whatever else has come out lately), I've given up on a lot of it.  I join Yahoo Groups of interest, and I delete them as I lose interest or when they are too slow - or too busy - for me to pay attention to.  Funny how that was my method of learning and networking almost a decade ago - and it still is Old Faithful for me today.

Now - shut down your email program and get back to work.  (Me, not you!  Well - you too, if need be!)