Time Management

There's a great post on An Entrepreneur's Life regarding time management.  From the post:

It occurred to me the biggest time drains in my day were a) E-mail, b) E-mail, and c) E-mail. Next comes the stacks of partially finished projects, the 4 full bookshelves, and my numerous areas of stuff needing attention. All in or done in my office.

So, I bought an iBook.

It does not have E-mail set up and never will. When it’s time to work on important projects, I carry it into another office (that doesn’t have my stuff in it) to work; or strut over to Starbucks and down enough caffeine for the entire state of Virginia while pumping out the copy. In a sense, I’ve “ritualized” the entire process of writing including the tools I do it with. I’ve finished 3 major projects in the last 3 days that were dragging on for weeks. My productivity has soared. It’s great!As for my main, office computer, I’ve made a life-changing shift there, as well.

I only check E-mail once per day, at the end of the day.

If someone has to get me quickly, they now know E-mail isn’t the way to do it. The dozen people who I want to have immediate access to me, have a private phone number. Everyone else goes in the queue.

Wow!  I'm tempted to try it, anybody else intrigued?  The sheer volume of e-mail that I receive daily at work is quite astounding; I seem to spend much of my day replying to or deleting e-mails on either my computer (if I am in the office) or on my Blackberry (if I am out of the office).  While I do practice efficient e-mailing -- brevity rules and responses are not given unless required/requested -- it still takes up a large chunk of my day.  I used to pride myself on always having an empty Inbox because I was so on top of my e-mail, but perhaps that's a bad measurement.

Most IT departments don't support Macs, but I wonder how much of that simply has to do with Exchange or Notes compatibility.  Certainly I find Macs to be much more user friendly and highly capable of accomplishing everything I can do on my Windows machine with the exception of company e-mail.  If I employed a similar strategy to that stated above, I probably would go with a Mac too, they're just easier and more fun to use.

Regarding a small group of people having private access to me during the day, I could easily achieve that by adding a second line to my Nextel phone.  Going a step further, I could raise the barrier to entry by only responding to Direct Connect (i.e., radio) calls:  No Nextel?  Too bad, can't get in touch with me.

Could this actually work outside an entrepreneurial environment?  I don't know, but I sure would be willing to give it a try.  Hell, I probably will give it a try; there's a Borders right across from our office with wireless access.

Now, anyone want to help me in my experiment by offering up a decently priced (used would be fine) iBook or G4 Powerbook?  If you give me a good deal, I'll give you my Nextel private ID . . .