Procrastination Enablers – Emails Part 3

After discussing the issues of having many accounts on Monday and the need to trim down your subscriptions in the second, today, we talk maintenance.

You are a woman of a certain age, with certain responsibilities, and now, you are using email as yet another excuse to not get things done. Emails enable you to procrastinate. No AviddivA has to release her power to her email account. Here are a couple of tips to keep in mind.

Tip #1: Every year, when you are writing those resolutions that you may or may not keep, take a little time to do some email maintenance. Decide what you want to keep coming and what no longer serves you. If you are like me, you get most of your email in your cell phone too. That might be an issue. Between Facebook and your email account, you barely have memory on your device. Trim the fat.

Tip #2: Monitor your subscriptions often. I am getting into the habit of revising my accounts every six months. It is amazing that in the last six months, I subscribed to eight new weekly e-zines. I took a good look and realized I rarely read any of them. Some of them are in two different accounts! Enough. If I don’t read it, I press the unsubscribe button.

Tip #3: If your family likes to send you chain emails, and you don’t like receiving those, LET THEM KNOW. I sent a message to all my family and friends explaining that I had no memory in my email accounts for that stuff. I also don’t have Microsoft Office installed, which makes it a little bothersome to get that stuff. I also explained that if they kept sending them, I would identify their messages as spam and that when they had an actual message to send, I would not get it. They don’t send those anymore.

You teach people how to treat you, in life and on the internet. Make sure that you respect their boundaries as well as your own. Don’t subscribe to twenty e-zines if you only have an hour a day to check your emails. Chances are, they will pile up.

Let me know how it goes in the comments section below.

Procrastination Enablers – Emails Part 2

Yesterday I told you that you can procrastinate less by eliminating all those email accounts that you have. The main reason for this is that thanks to social networks, we really have more accounts than we need. When I started counting, I discovered that aside from Facebook, Myspace and Twitter, I have about 12 more email accounts. Not a good thing when you consider that I am not including work related email accounts. So, I started eliminating accounts and I gave you the system that I am using to eliminate all but three personal accounts and one business account.

Now, I want to concentrate on the actual emails you receive. I am a coach, a consultant and a writer. I love to read, it helps and inspires me. It keeps me up to date on what’s going on. I’m sure that you receive a lot of email that is related to your personal and business interests. There are several things to consider:
- Personal messages, shopping messages, general interest emails should go to your personal account.
- Business interests, seminars, coaching and all other work related emails should go to your business account.
- You are probably subscribed to many services, some of which you never read.
- This would be a good time to count and eliminate all the unnecessary messages.

One of my mentors, Carrie Wilkerson, said something to me earlier in the year about this topic. You should pick one mentor (maybe two) and stick to receiving information from that mentor in your email. You can have a million on your social network account. You should only receive email from one. Why? Because the more mentors you have subscribed to, the more clutter and noise you are receiving and the less you are doing.

It is time for some serious elimination of junk from your email. I give you my strategy and you can adapt this to serve you however you wish.
1) Make a list of all the mailing lists and mentors you are subscribed to. If you want, you can have different categories. I did this for my personal email (shopping, blogs, etc) and for business (business development, internet marketing, coaching).
2) Verify if you can subscribe to their feeds on twitter and/or facebook or whatever other network site you belong to. Go ahead and subscribe there.
3) Pick one, at most two, that you want to receive information from on your email. If you decide to pick for each category, then you should only pick one.
4) Every four to six months, revise your email list. You have probably subscribed to a couple more now.
5) Every year, if you change your mentor, make sure to unsubscribe from receiving email before you start receiving the new mentor’s material.
6) Unsubscribe from receiving email from any company, person or product that you have not opened a message from in at least two weeks.

Yes, you are going to be brutal about this. No, they will not get their feelings hurt. Yes, take back your time and your power and feel how good it feels. Make sure to leave me your comments below.

Procrastination Enablers – Emails Part 1

This week, I am going to help you sort through one of the most ingenious ways in which we AviddivA’s look busy without really doing much: emails.

What do I mean by that? Face it, there are many things in our email accounts that no longer serve us. We keep receiving emails from a company we are no longer interested in. We subscribed to a magazine we rarely have time to check out anymore. Sound familiar?

My first question to you is: how many email accounts do you have? If you are a woman over 40, you probably have more than one. Right now, I want you to ignore your business account when you tell me how many. Do you have three, four, five, or even more? I confess, I have 12. I used to have 12 until today. I decided to consolidate ALL my emails into two accounts, the business one and one personal. However, I have to be honest, I will still have four. Why? Because I have one which is the one all my family and friends send things to. I have a separate account with my job related things (in case I need a part time or I decide to go consulting) and I have one for my pen name (the one I write fiction with). I take the opportunity to let you know that if you send any correspondence to boricuanlove@yahoo.com or cat-cruz312@hotmail.com….STOP. Those two accounts are closed as of Sunday, July 25, 2010.

My second question to you is: what is your average email count? The smallest account I had, kept 40 emails in the Inbox and had another 85 stashed in different folders. Now, it has zero. I’m not going to tell you how many messages the biggest account has, all I can say is that it is over 2,000. If you take an average, this should be about 12,000 messages between all the accounts. No wonder most of them are erased, unopened. Who has the time?

My assignment for you this week is this:
1) Take stock of how many accounts you have.
2) Open the smallest one and without mercy, sort through your email.
3) If there is something you really want to keep receiving, change your preferences and send it to your main account. Otherwise, unsubscribe from all your mailings.
4) Take the next smallest account and repeat steps from 1 through 3.

I estimate that it is going to take me about a month to deal with all my email accounts and streamline it to only those accounts that I mentioned before. Tomorrow, I will give you some more tips on how to procrastinate less by deciding what to keep and what to trash.

Friday Update – Getting to know You

Welcome to another edition of the Friday Update for Procrastination Diaries. It is my pleasure to welcome you to my page.

First and foremost, I want to welcome some new readers we got this week, thanks to the fabulously40.com community. Ladies, you are great support. I also want to thank you for all the great comments and advice.

The second thing I want to do is apologize to the subscribers for the lateness of the Procrastination Diaries e-letter. As we are born and start to grow, changes will continue in order to offer you the most precise information. Our intent is to entertain and educate and to that end, we are working really hard to send you a worthy issue.

Last but not least, we want to thank all the new members to the Facebook Page. Thank you so much for being part of the AviddivA family.

Have a great weekend.

Thursday Reading

Today we start a new segment on the AviddivA blog.  It is called Thursday Reading.  Before we begin, a few ground rules:

1) My selection of books is random.  I might pick up something at the library or from my book collection.

2)  I don’t believe that there are bad books.  You can learn something from any experience.

3)  My mention of a book is not an endorsement.  You read what you want.  I will only tell you my impressions.

4)  I will post a link to amazon.com in case you like the book.  It is an affiliate link.  I will not get rich from you buying this book.  If enough of you pick enough books, I might be able to cover the cost of the web page.

So, on to the book selection.

Title:  Second Acts that Change Lives

Author:  Mary Beth Sammons

Rating:  5 Divas (out of a possible 7)

My impressions of the book:  It is an easy read.  If you are the kind of person that loves real life stories of what a writer is trying to convey, get ready.  There are plenty of those here.  There is a common theme here – it is never to late to fulfill your dreams and change your destiny.

There are some exercises and pointers on how to achieve your dreams.  There are examples that go from a small personal dream to a goal that will impact many others.  I believe that it is not important how many people are impacted by your dream.  If you have a desire burning in your heart, that is worth exploring.

If you have read this book, please add your comments on the section below or you can check out the book. Thanks for reading.

Procrastination and Consistency – Day 3

Consistency is an issue that we should discuss.  Is it the exact opposite of procrastination?  What do you think?

Many times I have wondered if being more consistent would eliminate procrastination.  I wish I could tell you that consistency is the key for you to stop procrastinating on your dreams.  The issue is not so black and white.

You see, if you are a woman over 40, you have accomplished certain things.  Maybe you don’t see it that way.  Let me tell you more.  We all procrastinate.  The reason why this is so important for us is because what we procrastinate on is the real issue.

We let ourselves go.  You might think that this does not include you because you are skinny and you wear nice clothes.  When was the last time you had a complete physical?  Do you always eat clean and exercise?  Do you understand that exercise is not only for those who want to loose weight, it is for everybody?  How healthy is your hair? Your nails?  How clean is your house?  How is your family doing?  Your business?  Your friends?  It is impossible that every single aspect of our lives is perfect.  We are human and we will procrastinate.  I just want you to put yourself first instead of last, after your job, your family, pets, school and everything else.

Can you do that for a week?  Can you keep it up for a month?  Leave your comments and challenges below.  We thank you for reading.

Procrastination and Consistency – Day 2

Yesterday, I challenged myself to improve my consistency.  Today I am still on track.  I posted something today, that would be two out of two.

My aim for this blog is to post every day of the week, 5 days a week, weekends off.  I think I am doing well.

Yesterday I mentioned that I had to sit down and answer the hard questions.  Today I ask you, do you really want this?

If you are a woman over 40 and tired of being the last thing on your to do list, it is time for a change.  First of all, you are not a thing, you are a person and your needs come first.  Second, you are setting a bad example for everyone around you by leaving yourself for last.  Your kids are confusing respect with devotion.  They are devoted to you for being their mother.  They lack respect for you because you put them first to the exclusion of you.  You are setting a bad example because our children repeat what they see, not what we tell them.

This is not about being self absorbed, vain, narcissistic or an egotist.  It has everything to do with fueling your tank first in order to be of service to others.  I don’t expect you to take 16 hours of the day to deal with yourself.  If you take one hour a day to pray, exercise, eat right and celebrate you, then the other 23 hours of the day will be better spent.  And by the way, it does not have to be a whole hour.  You can take 15 minutes in the morning to pray and/or read the Bible (or whatever your book of worship is), later on the day you can take half an hour to exercise and another 20 minutes to plan and cook your meals for the day.

Take care of you first.  Don’t procrastinate on the most important project in your life: you.  Be an AviddivA.  Celebrate your 40 plus years of greatness.

Procrastination and Consistency – Day 1

Where am I going wrong?

Every week I make plans for what I want to do with my life and my business.  By Wednesday, I forget.  The issue is consistency and the symptom is procrastination.

I sat down on a chair today and set to ask myself the tough questions.  Do I really want to do this?  Really?  Where should I start?

If I want to be consistent, I need a plan.  I need to make a certain amount of posts a week, a certain amount of articles written every day and spend a certain amount of time daily trolling blogs and forums for my peeps, research and to comment on. I should devote a certain amount of hours a week to making videos, and sending them to my assistant for edition and posting.

It is not a matter of developing a campaign.  I actually have to do it.  I have developed several campaigns.  I just don’t take the steps. Let’s see how we do this week.  Today is a new beginning.  And I know for a fact that today I am posting something about this.  So now, what do you think I can do to improve my consistency?  Leave me your suggestions below and thank you for reading.

Friday Update: Procrastination Leads to Reorganization

Happy Friday everyone.  This is the day of the week when I let you in on what is going on at AviddivA.

As you may know, we have a monthly e-letter.  You can subscribe here Originally, it was supposed to come out every two weeks.  We are still learning how to work this new technology so, even though most of the material is written already, it will be sent once a month until we figure it all out.  We hope to provide you the best content possible.  Feel free to suggest ideas on what you want to see in future issues.

In other news, we are creating a new e-book on procrastination tips and tricks.  We want you to send in your suggestions as well.  Every person included will be named co-author.  Make sure you send your tips and tricks before July 21st, 2010.  We appreciate your support.

Now, our suggestion for today is that you go out and have a great time.  We will be back next Monday with more great information.  Feel free to leave your comments below.

Does Exercise Have to be Boring?

Today, I went to the Historical Downtown district.  I keep my snail mail box there.  They also have a great library and some cool restaurants, that I will talk about in other posts.  The thing is, I don’t have a car and I like to walk the 1.35 miles to go there.  It is not only great exercise.  It takes us out of the house, we see something different and we move.

This is a short post today and a very simple one.  Exercise does not have to be boring.  Look for something you like to do and find a way to incorporate a nice walk, a bike ride or some roller blades into that routine.  Maybe you have a small market nearby or a mall.  Instead of driving everywhere, find something to do outside the home and find a different way of getting there.

Have fun, make it a a family activity.  Stop putting it off.  If you want to get in better shape and you don’t know where you start, start where you are.  Look for some trails, parks or malls in your area and start moving.  Go!

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