All Emails in Time
I'm desperately trying to manage all my communications resources. When to email, when to call, when to meet, when to tweet, when to blog and when to throw my hands up and sob. And then there's Facebook. Not to mention submissions. I want to be accessible, but I also want to be productive.
Friends have offered lots of well meaning advice: keep your responses short, use different mailboxes, have multiple accounts, have one account, face west and stand on one foot when you are answering emails. Of course, I also have a book about how to handle this quintessentially modern problem. And, of course, I haven't had time to read it yet.
But even when I am in danger of being overwhelmed by emails, I still like them. It's like a Go Fish game. Clicking on that little stamp at the bottom of my screen still conjures faint feelings of this-could-be-the-lottery-winner excitement. Something really wonderful could be just one click away.
I've improved my odds a little on having a happy surprise in my inbox. Our author, Dwight Edwards, who wrote A Tale of Three Ships, a concise and useful parable about charting your course through life, has an email blast. Every so often--and it seems to always be just when I need it most--a short inspirational story pops up in my mail. Here is today's, just when I am tearing my hair out over time-management questions.
Spending Time Well
"Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for it is the stuff life is made of." Benjamin Franklin
Time. It is the one of the few things we all share in common. And we all do something with it - for better or worse. It strikes me that one of the great difficulties in using our time most effectively is maintaining a proper perspective on its market value. In the push and shove of our daily lives, it becomes desperately easy to lose sight of the preciousness of these things called minutes, hours, and days. Arnold Bennett puts it well,
Time is the inexplicable raw material of everything. With it, all is possible; without it, nothing. The supply of time is truly a daily miracle, an affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it. You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions... No one can take it from you. It is not something that can be stolen. And no one receives either more or less than you receive. Moreover, you cannot draw on its future. Impossible to get into debt! You can only waste the passing moment. You cannot waste tomorrow; it is kept for you. You cannot waste the next hour; it is kept for you.
Franklin is right. Time is indeed "the stuff life is made of". We all are entrusted with the same amount. The only question is where and how we will spend it. ~Dwight Edwards
Flashpoint: Well-spent lives are the result of well-utilized time.
Visit Dwight at HighOctanefortheMind.com
Copyright © 2010 High Octane for the Mind. All Rights Reserved.
And with that much needed perspective, I think I'll get off-line and go back to editing.
The clock talked loud. I threw it away, it scared me what it talked.
~Tillie Olsen
