I have no idea what the percentage of
Type A personality folks we have running around these days (pun intended) and when email came along clearly that was bad enough, but when they put it all on our hip and gave it names like Blackberry, Treo, and Smart Phones, stress meters had to change their scales and create a new one called 'For Heart Attack, Click Here.'
I don't know about you, but I have been trying for what seems like forever to figure out how to control the guilt I feel when I am not opening and responding to an email within a matter of minutes. Worse, I now find myself now trying to learn how to eat with my left hand so that I can respond while holding my Treo in my right hand while trying to thumb out a response while at the same time holding it up to serve as shield of sorts to ward off whatever it is that my wife is throwing at me at that particular moment.
Okay, maybe a bit overstated, but directionally, I'm closer to that description than (a) I would like to be and (b) than common sense says I ought to be.
It is for this reason that I was very pleased to get a note from my colleague
Lauryn Franzoni, our Vice President and Executive Editor, pointing me toward a piece written by
Stewart Friedman on the
Harvard Business Publishing site called
Master the Art of Interruptibility. Stew Friedman is the Wharton School professor who wrote the very popular book
Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life. A book by the way well worth reading if you can stay off your PDA long enough.
Anyway, if you haven't read Friedman's piece and you are in need of Treo therapy as I am, the suggestions he has to make a lot of sense.
So much so, that if you have any comments to make on this particular post, don't expect them to be published immediately as I am going to try and only go through my emails between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. so I may not get to it as soon as I normally would.
Don't laugh, it's a start!
