Posts Tagged ‘Work at home’

I’m Digging through My Emails Looking for Money

May 5th, 2011

Does email have a tight grip on your brain?
I am deep in the compulsive email trap of whether my inbox contains any new messages. Okay, I understand part of the problem: I work from home and all work arrives and departs by email. I also have 2 of these ‘at home’ jobs so the email traffic is pretty heavy, but man, I am truly addicted.

I keep them
There’s a worse side to my addiction. I save many of the emails in case I need to look at them later, so I have 30 or 30 folders and each is bulging with well-read emails. I even look at the old ones sometimes in case I missed a line that I can convert into money. Don’t laugh – it has happened.

My day
My day starts when I hop out of bed, grab my electric razor and go the study where I shave while I read the emails that have drifted in during the night. I am mainly interested in anything related to work I have done or requests for new work. One of my clients is an international company with work scattered around the planet so there is always something going on in one country or another and this company expects all work to be completed by yesterday at the latest.

Everyone else
According to productivity guru Tim Ferriss, 66 per cent of people read email seven days a week and expect same-day responses to messages. The reason for the obsession, analysts agree, is that email plays on the perception that a vital message might arrive any second. We think that if we fail to check our email every 15 minutes, we will miss “the big one” that brings a payout, says Adelaide’s ‘Tech Guy’ Richard Pascoe. Pascoe likens email to a giant poker machine, which captivates gamblers with the promise of intermittent rewards.

Logging off
Increasingly, it seems, we lack the will to break free, or log off at all. Recent research conducted by US scientists on students found that four in five reported symptoms of distress, confusion and isolation within just 24 hours of logging off. A “clear majority” failed to complete the voluntary 24-hour tech-free period.

Email addiction: seven sorry symptoms
1. First thing in the morning, you wake your computer and check your email tally.

2. Throughout the working day, you twitchily check your email every 10 minutes.

3. Before going out, unless you have roaming mobile email access, you set up an auto-responder – even if you are only offline for a morning. As soon as you walk back through the door, you check.

4. You check your email during the breaks of the TV soap that also has you hooked.

5. Going any full day without email gives you withdrawal symptoms – sweats, shakes, even headaches.

6. If you see you have no new mail, you check again, just in case another message has come in the intervening split-second.

7. You checked your email before finishing this list.

Tags: Email, Email addiction, Email compulsion, Work at home
Posted in Economy, Employment, Finance, Personal / Internet | No Comments »