Thursday, December 1, 2011

E-Mail is Evil

Day 21 of 365 Tiny Changes

I am working diligently to get through the 3 projects I have assigned myself to get completed, ASAP.

1)  Clear my bedroom of all the file boxes, by actually filing the contents in the proper file cabinet drawers.
2)  Review and sort all photos in my iPhoto, dumping the “bad” photos and burning the rest onto archival discs.  I started with over 9000 photos going back to 2007.
3)  Clearing both my e-mail accounts.

So far I haven’t made any noticeable headway with the filing, but that will change soon, because it’s time to pay the monthly bills.

I have sorted and burned the photos from 2007 and 2008.  I have 7249 from 2009, 2010, and 2011 to go.

And finally the e-mail accounts.  This morning I managed to clear one of the 2 of them, and make a dent into the other one.

I hate e-mail.  It’s an evil conspiracy of an Eastern Syndicate, as Lucy from Peanuts would say.

I woke up this morning with 22 e-mails left in my in-box.  I was determined to clear them this morning before my shower.  So I got my cup of tea and sat down to power through them.  My intentions were to get through them, get ready for the day and get on with my to-do-list.  This was at 8:00 AM.

the next time I looked at the clock, it said 11:10!  I’d been on the computer for over 3 hours!  At 11:10 I found myself researching get away weekends.  What?

When I sat down, get away weekends were no where near my thought stream.  I was drug there by enticing messages in my in-box.  It’s a conspiracy, I tell you.

The message that led me astray was actually in my SPAM folder.  I HATE SPAM.  It is my personal mission to eradicate SPAM from my e-mail.  Since I signed up for all the couponing web sites my SPAM folder has been over flowing.  To get rid of them I open each one and unsubscribe, twice.  Each message is from a company that I unsubscribe from and then it is from an agent that I unsubscribe from. 

Doing this is time consuming, but it has lowered the number of SPAM messages that I am getting.  Why do I care?  I care because, occasionally an important message will get misdirected into my SPAM folder, and I abhor wading through two pages of messages to make sure I don’t miss that one important note.  I would rather I have one or 2 messages to wade through.

So anyway, there it was, in my SPAM folder, a message from Groupon.  I opened it and was about to unsubscribe, when a little voice said, DON’T.
The people in my couponing group on Facebook, seem to be getting some really good deals through Groupon, maybe I’ll take a look.

Suddenly, I’m looking at deals for scuba diving adventures, travel abroad and weekend get aways.  Not one to take a deal at face value I dive into the web sites of the companies offering the deals, comparing the offered deal to other packages they have.  Back and forth, Groupon deals to web sites.  Until, finally, I made my choice.  A choice I didn’t even know I wanted to make at 8:00 this morning.

You see, it’s Christmas time and it’s my domestic partner, Guy’s, birthday.  He has been working very hard and he needs a break.  Here it was right in front of me, his birthday gift.

Guy is not an avid reader of my blog, probably because he’s living these tiny changes with me.  But, just in case, he chooses to read this entry, I can’t tell you what I bought.  I really wish I could, because it was such a great deal and he is really gonna love it, but alas my hands are tied, until after his birthday on the 19th.

So where does all this lead me?  To my next tiny change of course.

Tiny change 21:  Block out one hour, only, each morning to address e-mail messages. 

This tiny change should keep me from loosing a whole morning on any unplanned cyber shopping trips.  I’ll save those for my down time in the evenings.

If you can relate, or have been unsuspectingly side tracked by your e-mail messages, I would love to hear your story.

Best Regards,

Linda

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