Slaying the E-mail Dragon

Yesterday, frustrated and overwhelmed by my e-mail, I posted the following status update on Facebook:

It’s official. I can no longer cope with the sheer number of e-mails coming my way. 414 unread e-mails in my Inbox and that’s after an hour of reading, responding, deleting. Tips? Advice? Help!

I got a flood of responses, both on Facebook and Twitter and while not everything is applicable to me, most of it is advice I can use. I do file, categorize and tag important e-mails, so that’s not my problem. It’s the numbers. The volume is hard to handle, and a lot of it is important. I have a separate e-mail address for newsletters and unimportant but useful things, like Google alerts, that don’t clog up my regular Inbox. But I regularly receive stuff from public relations departments, editors, fellow writers, aspiring writers, friends, family, writing groups, etc, that have currently left my Inbox looking like… well, pretty much like my office, actually. Disjointed, unorganized, papers everywhere. Stuffed full of things I will need and things I will not need. The problem is 414 was just yesterday. I looked through almost all of it, and I’m back up to 259 today. It’s unstoppable!

Earlier this morning, a friend sent me a link to this article about coping with e-mail overload and I’ve been dealing with it all today with a set timer, and I’m happy to report that so far, this is working absolutely brilliantly! I’ve currently got 46 unread e-mails in my Inbox, but like another friend said on Facebook, Inbox zero is overrated. So I’ll just let them sit.

If e-mail’s taking over your life and work as well, give it a try. So far, it seems to work.

New Work

Did I sound depressed yesterday? Well, I was a little bit. On days like that, I typically stay away from blogs, Facebook and Twitter, but I’m participating in the 2012 Blogathon, which means I’m committed to blogging every day. Blame Michelle Rafter.

Some work to share with you today. I’ve been writing a number of articles for a new website. Well, it launched yesterday and now I’m ready to share some of the early work with you.

How Safe is Your Birth Control?

9 Simple Ways to Improve Your Memory

9 Self-Checks Every Woman Should Do

Why Isn’t Your Diet Working?

5 “Me Time” Ideas

Tell me what you think!

Little Lessons

I feel like I’m being tested. Like the universe is saying, “Think you can handle six deadlines in a week? Well, here are three more assignments, due before Friday. And I’m sending your husband off on a business trip for two weeks. See if you can handle that.”

I’m not up for the challenge, but since I have no choice in the matter, I’m soldiering on. At least our savings are back up to pre-baby levels.

Last year, May 8 was Mother’s Day. It was the day we found out I was pregnant and the fact that I’d been falling asleep on my desk and had on at least one occasion blacked out, finally made sense. Now I’m sitting across from my four-month-old, who for the first time today, has held a rattle and discovered that he likes it. The shape, the noise, all new, all fascinating. He won’t let it go.

Watching him cling desperately to that rattle reminds me of the things I find hard to let go.

I’m currently reading the book When Everything Changes, Change Everything by Neale Donald Walsch. I picked it up several years ago when I was going through a rough time in my life and never really finished it.

The last month has been emotionally taxing. Some of my family and friends have been going through drastic life changes, traumas, and tragedies, and it’s been a few weeks of non-stop bad news arriving one after the other and while it has put life and a lot of pettiness in perspective, it’s also been a time of grieving. A good friend of mine lost her child recently; her daughter was only a couple of months younger than Jude. This news has brought me to my knees. I am shocked, I am angry. Sometimes breathing is difficult.

I decided to revisit this book again. I felt like I needed an anchor, some grounding. It has made me put my life under the microscope and decide whether certain situations, certain relationships, can go on the way they have in the past. Whether letting go with love, kindness and goodwill, even as it breaks my heart, may be the happier option for everyone involved.

There’s a line in the book that resonates with me: Change is an announcement that something is not working. Or to put it another way, if something’s not working, change it. Fix it. Or let it go.

Be the change. Create the change. Accept the change.

Sometimes, it’s the little lessons that are the hardest.

Back to Books

I’ve missed my books.

This weekend, I put aside work, housework and the dozens of errands I had to run, to sit down and get back to the business of reading. It’s been said a million times before, so I’m really just paraphrasing here, but when I sit down to read, I feel like I’m with a trusted friend. When I’m going through a rough time in my life, I’ll pick up books I’ve already read, whose endings I know, whose characters feel as close to me as people in my own life. When I’m feeling adventurous, I might try a completely new genre. When I’m bored, I read. When I’m tired, I read. When I’m stressed, I read.

Reading makes me happy. I can let my mind drift into the pages and forget about everything around me.

In all the busy-ness that has been my life lately, I’ve had very little time for reading. And I’ve missed it terribly. So this weekend was a treat to myself, a permission slip to get lost in worlds separate from the one to which I belong.

This is what’s on my night stand at the moment:

1. The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth

2. The Shipping News by Annie Proulx

3. Shelter by Harlan Coben

4. When Everything Changes, Change Everything by Neale Donald Walsch

5. Taken at the Flood by Agatha Christie

6. Open by Andre Agassi

7. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

8. The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy

Why I Write

I belong to an online writing group of non-fiction writers who’re trying to finish their first novels. Some of us have been at it for over a year (*cough cough*), some for several years, and some for just a few weeks or months. Many are starting anew.

We decided, after a period of relative calmness, that it was time to dust off those pages and start again with new goals, new ideas, and new words. I am, as you know, trying to begin work on my novel again and this time, instead of lofty goals, I’ve decided on a reasonable target of 1,000 words a week.

We were discussing in our re-introductions to each other why each of us writes and it got me thinking about my reasons for writing non-fiction, my reasons for writing fiction, and my reasons for writing this blog.

No matter how I try to differentiate the non-fiction from the personal from the entirely fictional, it all comes down to this: I write because that is, essentially, how I make sense of the world.

It wasn’t always this way. Growing up, talking things through with my best friend was the only way I knew to calm myself. I found myself in trouble frequently, I got involved in drama often, and it was always my best friend’s calm exterior that managed to put me at ease. Her words soothed me.

As I’ve grown older and writing has become an integral part of my life, words still soothe me, but I find that often, they’re simply my own. Whenever I’m feeling stressed or upset about something, I write in my journal. I reason things out, I give voice to my feelings, I’m angry, I’m sad, I’m happy. I allow myself to simply let loose, to let those thoughts that are bouncing about in my head fall on to the page and be free.

I have heard from other people– writers and non-writers both– that just writing about a problem in their journal sometimes leads to several solutions. I’ve interviewed psychologists who advise patients to write down their feelings because letting it go in that way ensures that the bottled up emotions don’t one day erupt.

Writing brings a context to certain events, it gives shape to experiences, it allows me to explore feelings and thoughts I didn’t even know I had.

Why do I write? Because I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I didn’t.

Why do you write?

Reasons to Love Freelancing