.: On Tokyo Time :.

Almost every article on improving your productivity recommends focusing your email activity on specific periods instead of checking your email every 10 minutes (or more frequently). While this is a great idea it doesn’t really work for me.

Most of my data is stored in email and I need my previously received messages as a data source. I can’t close my email for hours as it contains a lot of the information I need to work with. Now, what happens typically is what we all know all to well: I’m trying to find this one message and get distracted by incoming email. Before I know it I forget what I was actuallly looking for and wonder off.

The solution: Every email application needs a big pause button that temporarily suspends fetching new email! Sure, a similar result can be achieved by decreasing your fetch frequency in your settings. I wonder if there is a difference in behavior though when you consciously hit pause vs. just decreasing the frequency. You’re basically declaring that you want to focus on a task. And there is no doubt that there are no new messages. In the latter case there is always some uncertainty which might lead you to check.

I’ve been toying around with this idea for a few weeks now. Then this week a change on the corporate Mail server broke my Mail setup and I stopped receiving emails. It did indeed increase my focus and therefore productivity for a while as it reduced distractions. However once I realized that I’m not receiving any messages at all I started investigating what was up and trying to solve the problem. I’m not sure if there was a net benefit in productivity in the end. However it was good to experience that the world didn’t end just because I didn’t reply to any messages in 4 hours.

Mashable is one of the most comprehensive blogs covering web startups and technology. It’s written by a group of authors and they’re on a roll. I can barely keep up reading the posts at the pace they publish. The sheer volume of posts has actually made me consider unsubscribing as a few other blogs cover similar topics (Read/WriteWeb, Valleywag, Techcrunch). The quality of the content has kept me subscribed so far. The posts are well written and contain critical analysis.

Interestingly enough I don’t know who’s behind Mashable. This might be mainly due to the fact that I’m reading it in a feed reader where the author is not displayed anywhere. It’s not hard to find out who’s writing it, I just never bothered. The blog itself is important not the individual contributors, similarly to a newspaper. Compare this to Seth Godin or Doc Searls where the person takes the center stage. Can you build your personal brand as a contributor to a group blog?

Back to the blogs mentioned above: I unsubscribed from Techcrunch a while ago. Too much hype, not enough analysis. Plus the arrogant writing style annoyed me. Valleywag has gotten pretty good in terms of analysis and seeing through the hype. Plus it’s funny from time to time. Staying subscribed. Read/WriteWeb is more narrowly focused on the web compared to Mashable. There is a pretty big overlap between the two though. I go from planning to unsubscribe from Read/WriteWeb (Mashable is covering the same topics and more) to planning to unsubscribe from Mashable (Read/WriteWeb covers the essential). It’s interesting to have two point of views and resulting analysis on the same topic though. Staying subscribed to both for the time being.

I stumbled over a draft post on my feed reading habits from about a year ago. My list of subscriptions has changed significantly since then. I’ve unsubscribed from various blogs that didn’t add value. Most of them are probably still around but I stopped reading them. I do consider a few still must reads though namely gapingvoid and Seth Godin. I find both inspiring.