I’m back in the US of A! OK, well, I’ve actually been back for 3 weeks now. But it still feels like I just got back. Before really getting back to blogging, wanted to give some quick observations on being gone and away from all sorts of online communication.
On my family trip to India from Dec. 12 – Jan 1, even though I had easy access if I really wanted to, I made a concerted effort not to get online or do work. I spent a grand total of zero minutes on the phone during that period and 1.5 total hours online in 3 sessions, almost all of that checking email. I didn’t read any online news or any online blogs. I didn’t check Facebook or Twitter or web traffic reports or stock tickers or anything.
And it was really refreshing and invigorating.
Like I said, I did check email 3 times to make sure nothing critical had come up regarding key deals/milestones/etc. for ClearContext. But, besides that, I let my away message handle everything else. Of course, this was possible due to planning ahead and delegating things to a very capable team. But the main thing to point out that many of us forget is that it actually is possible.
Upon my return, I spent two days getting my inbox down from thousands to about 50 emails that required more than a one-line response. There’s no question that the prioritization and categorization capabilities of ClearContext were a huge help in doing this. By my third day back I was back to an empty Inbox. I shudder to think how much longer it would have taken to get through my inbox processing everything sequentially and individually.
Perhaps even more eye-opening to me was how many blog entries and news items I read when checking every day, as opposed to when I bunch them up. I had many RSS feeds with over 100 items that I was able to scan and only felt it necessary to read a couple of items, whereas I would have likely read a couple of items every day from those feeds if I were checking frequently. After three weeks away, I felt caught up on both news and technology in just a few hours. I’m definitely going to check most of my feeds less often. The same thing applies to news sites. For most stories, I can definitely more than make do with far fewer updates. And it definitely didn’t hurt to check things like Facebook quite infrequently. Some things to think about in terms of where those little chunks of time go.
OK, I’ll leave you with a few cool India pictures I stole from my brother-in-law Jeff before getting back to serious blogging!
The Amber Fort in Jaipur. Amazing.
The Taj Mahal in Agra, amazing that they were able to build things like this hundreds of years ago. The next picture shows the scale of the Taj.
Some white rhinos we saw in Northern India on safari.
And, of course, me on an elephant!