You can CLOSE Outlook?!

I spent last weekend at a great workshop for new physics and astronomy faculty hosted by the American Association of Physics Teachers, the American Physical Society, the American Astronomical Society, and the National Science Foundation. The second-to-last session was titled "Time Management" in the schedule.

The actual title of the session was "Doing What Matters."

As a Christian, I found this title---and the accompanying theme---intriguing. The speaker's main point was, "Your job is not to manage your time. Your job is to pursue what matters."

He offered a challenging way to make sure we have the time to pursue what matters: Turn off our e-mail for one hour a day.

You could feel the entire room seize up when he said this, but we knew he was right. We knew that the reason it takes us a day to grade an exam or a week to "finalize" a proposal or a month to go so say, "Hi," to that colleague we haven't seen all semester is because of the near-incessant "BAY-DOO!" that directs our attention to the lower-right-hand corner of the screen, in the hopes that it will provide us with something more interesting than what we're doing at the moment.

So, I accepted his challenge. I'm writing this on Tuesday night, and for the last two days I've found the "Close" button on Outlook and left it off for one hour at a time.

And it was amazing what I could get done! I got all my notes from the Workshop typed up in what seemed like no time. I was able to take some thoughts from the weekend and outline a few grant proposals. I even got my afternoon lab ready this morning with hours to spare.

I'll close with the following point and a proposed experiment: One of the reasons this discipline works is because the amount of e-mail one receives is directly proportional to the amount of e-mail one sends. Thus, I'd like to propose to graph the number of e-mails I receive each hour this week along with the number of e-mails that I send each hour day. I'll post the results on Tuesday of next week. I invite you to do the same!