5 life lessons you can learn from emptying your inbox

This entry is part 11 of 11 in the series 7 Days to Inbox Zero

You’ve probably got a handful of e-mails that are still in your inbox because you are, on some level, avoiding them. These e-mails, more than anything else, illuminate your core personal or professional blocks. Forcing yourself through them — the way you have to in order to empty your inbox — is not just a path to e-mail efficiency, but a very meaningful exercise in character-building. Here are some of the lessons that may lie waiting in your inbox.

The 5 questions to ask about online distraction

Whether you’re worried about the Internet’s impact on your attention span, or tired of hearing about how life online is driving us to distraction, these 5 questions will help you think more deeply about online distraction.

The suffering of technology users

I love this paragraph because I think it distills and represents the pain and suffering so many people now feel around the role of technology in their lives: I like technology just as much as the next person, but sometimes I find myself feeling overwhelmed with it...

“Since I started blogging…”

I overhear more and more conversations about how people cope with their lives online. We talk about our day-to-day strategies for coping with e-mail overload. We gossip about our friends’ Facebook profiles and worry about whether we should be joining the latest...

Where are you at?

I have become so habituated to referring to people in my tweets as @robcottingham, @morganbrayton, @kk etc. that I’m starting to think of “at” as part of my friends’ names. You know, the way Spanish names often include “de la” or...

Social media is the jar my brain sits in

Brain-in-a-jar images of the future are usually presented as dystopian. But for many years, I found the brain-in-a-jar lifestyle nothing short of enviable: what could be better than eternal life, or even just regular old life, than dispensing with the annoyances of...

Locative technologies help us redefine what presence means

Simon King has a provocative blog post about the relationship between using technologies on-location, and actually being present in the location where you’re checking. He begins by comparing e-readers and smartphones to books or magazines: In my experience,...

Addicted to Internet addiction

Thanks to Tonic for pointing me towards Mark Malkoff’s unusual retreat from supposed Internet addiction: by spending 5 days offline, in the bathroom. Malkoff’s stunt was clearly more relevant as fodder for his online videos that as an insightful...

Another voice for your real life online

Suzanne Moore at the Mail Online has written my favorite recent social media polemic, Why my friends on Facebook and Twitter matter as much as those in the real world. As a journalist, I am a fan of both Facebook and Twitter and am rather bored of people telling me...

Alone online

When we have no project to finish, no friend to visit, no book to read, no television to watch or no record to play, and when we are left all alone by ourselves we are brought so close to the revelation of our basic human aloneness and are so afraid of experiencing an...