With the coming of the electronic mail, or e-mail as is commonly known today, in 1993, it has greatly revolutionised the communication system globally. It slowly phased out the conventional manner of writing and sending messages to the point where postal service was made extinct in most part of the planet .The method of exchanging digital messages using the internet has enabled information to travel in such an incredible speed that it only takes a fraction of a second to send a message across the globe.
The business and industrial worlds quickly adapt this new technology it because it speeds-up communication and transactions that result to their faster growth and development. Not long after, the benefits of the e-mail have attracted private individuals and let it to their homes and invade their private lives. In the proliferation of personal computers, the e-mail even competes with and surpasses the telephone as a means of reaching people.
However, the e-mail has so ingrained itself into our lives that its benefits are turning into nuisance, both in the business and private worlds. E-mail has begun to eat so much productive time among workers. It has become like an addiction to a great majority who fell into the habit of routinely stopping their more important work just to check their e-mails several times a day (some every hour even!). They have developed an anxiety syndrome of missing every piece of news that may have come through their e-mails, most of which are plain trash and time-waster.
Tim Ferris, in his bestseller book “A 4-Hour Work Week”, offers a suggestion to counteract this fast becoming nuisance with his Selective Ignorance method.
“Selective Ignorance”, Tim says, “is the practice of selectively ignoring distracting, irrelevant, or otherwise unnecessary information received. Basically, it is focusing on the information that is essential and ignoring the rest, or treating information as just in time”.
Tim Ferris considers e-mail as the single greatest time waster in modern life and prescribes what he refers to as “low-diet information e-mail”. This is done by minimizing the urge and the time of opening e-mails to twice a day or less.
When you receive information that does not help you in achieving the outcomes you plan to achieve, ignore the information. More inputs may just cause more distractions, and distraction is the killer of effective action. Most of them hinder you to from immediately attaining your goals and drains you of energy.
In his book “A4-Hour Work Week”, Tim Ferris puts forth what he calls the two fundamental principles of selective ignorance, namely:
“If you don’t define your goals clearly, everything seems important and requires action. If you define your goals clearly, especially your single most critical goal, almost all things are of little or no importance and few things require action.”
Trying to make everyone happy—besides being impossible—is the surest way to make yourself miserable.”
Think about the above principles and apply them today to reduce the stress on your brain and manage your information better.