Lines #15
©2008
3" x 3" – Mounted on stretched canvas
Sold
I get a lot of email. I think we probably all get a lot of email. I’ve tried a zillion different ways of dealing with it, none of it really working out.
I tried the David Allen method of stuffing it all away in a folder to keep inbox at 0 – yay – that was great – inbox was at zero, folder was full of unanswered email. The illusion of having things under control is pretty useless. Several months back I tossed all those unanswered emails back into my inbox, I’ve still got 20-40 of them left to deal with (like putting off an art consultant that wants a portfolio – crazy – what was/am I thinking?).
I had a huge ah-ha moment the other day realizing that my major problem with email is that I don’t really think it should take anytime at all to deal with. Pretty simple really, I needed to accept email is important and it does take time. Then the answer is obvious – just take the time to deal with it properly and stop resenting it, it’s the life line of my art business.
When I schedule my days I never build in a chunk of time to properly answer my email. I set aside time to make art and run errands and do specific art business tasks like answer interview questions or mail out work that has sold.
Well – duh – email is important – it’s mostly how I communicate with the world – I need to schedule time to answer it. Checking email is not the same as sitting down and answering it.
I know, I’ve read all about scheduling time for email but for some reason the value of doing that never really sank in until about a week ago. I think because I sit at a computer 8 hours a day for my day job I’ve always thought email isn’t something that needed this type of focus. I’ve now changed my mind. The 145 unanswered emails in my inbox, most since the beginning of this year, also convinced me that I need to do something different.
Email Habit
Time to develop much more efficient and useful emails habits. My initial plan is to first clean out the email queue and get my inbox back to 0. I figure this will take most of January. After that my plan is to set aside 30 minutes each morning before to handle art business email and another 30 minutes after work.
I’ll try that out for a few weeks and if it doesn’t work I’ll tweak it and keep trying til I find something that works. Maybe I’ll need to set aside more time a few days a week to deal with the emails with larger requests or that take more time to process.
I’ll let everyone know how it goes.
And big apologies to anyone that sent me email the last 3 or 4 weeks and I’ve not yet answered you. My plan around the beginning of the year for email was to completely ignore it. Which explains the long inbox. Sorry!
Photography
I have recently rephotographed a few of my newer textile paintings as I came to brilliant observation that my 2 lenses are quite different in quality. While the zoom lens is great for taking construction photos the colors are less than impressive. So I must remember to put the nice 50mm lens on the camera before photographing my artwork.
The red in Lines #15 above is much better (although still not 100% accurate – it’s really a bit more towards candy apple red than this version of slightly more orange red). I’ve decided to do the cropping, etc of these little pieces one at a time over the next few days, which conveniently gives me some images for my posts the next few days.
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{ 9 comments }
E-mails are something very abstract. If I imagine them to be people calling on the phone, then they come alive, and I see how vulnerable they all are, but at the same time find out who have to be rejected politely.
I was listening to an interview with an organisational consultant on the radio this week and her #1 time management tip was to be realistic about the time that tasks take. Her example was that a shirt takes longer than two minutes to iron properly, even if you have everything all set up and ready to go, so it is counterproductive to allocate 10 minutes to iron five shirts. Your observations about e-mail are in a similar vein.
I don’t really schedule time to deal with email, should. But I do record how I spend my time on iCal and it’s become pretty obvious to stay caught up I need at least an hour a day. Probably more because I’m not caught up!
R tells me that different lenses also have have different sharpnesses — zoom tends to not be as sharp at a fixed lens, and even fixed have different qualities. He tried to research reviews on the internet before buying and also has send one back because he didn’t think quality was good. My eyes stink, so I think they all look blurring, at least my photos do.
Boy, do I feel your pain with email! My inbox fell into a constant state of overwhelm last year when an email containing my artwork began to spread like wildfire. I find myself STILL trying to get on top of the email and not quite succeeding. Allotting specific times to address it sounds like a really good way to go about it. Sometimes I’ll let it go for days as I tackle orders, which makes the email task that much more burdensome when i finally *do* get to it.
I did find that making two folders for the business stuff, “answered queries” and “active orders” has been very helpful. I go through the inbox and flag everything that’s a question about the artwork and a possible future order. Those flags in the inbox tell me “HEY, you need to get on those!” When I respond to them they go into “answered queries”. When that person writes back and announces that they indeed would like to request a commissioned piece, I put that and the other notes from them into “active orders”. It just makes it so much easier to track all the little details (sometimes there are a lot of little details!) they’ve given me about their piece – and keeps me on track with their timelines.
Have you come across Mark Forster (www.markforster.net) He’s the best and his time management ideas DO WORK.
FYI – my monitor was recently calibrated and your lines #15 is very close to candy apple red on my monitor. So you might want to check your monitor before you do too many adjustments.
:-D eirdre
Eva – I like that – I don’t get many phone calls – maybe cause everyone emails me. And yes – sometimes the answer has to be no.
Brenda – yes – or like me – pretending it takes no time at all!
Pam – thanks for the lens info – I know I bought a very good expensive 50mm – I’m thinking me zoom is lacking that goodness.
Julie – really great tips – thank you!
Sue – I just read his stuff – interesting. My fav is using scrum – which is kind of a hybrid of GTD and DIT (mark forster) – I’m writing an ebook about it as my posts (do a search on scrum) weren’t quite enough info about what I do to follow it (also getting rid of all the geek references)
Deirdre – thank you for that! I’m using a laptop (with anice monitor) and I can’t seem to get it calibrated as I would like.
Hi Lisa …
It is a conundrum for me how to get it under control – that is for sure!! I had it down to 15 … part of my issue is that there are good requests … like to interview me … I have about 8 at the beginning of my InBox. I can’t do it all as it comes in … but if I file it, it probably won’t happen.
In the process again of figuring out HOW to simplify it … good post – thanks!
~ Diane Clancy
Yep Diane – it’s those longer emails that tend to be the sticking point. But by devoting a real chunk of time to email I’m finding I’m slowly getting it back under control. I’m down to 34 emails this morning – yay!
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