First Cup of Coffee - April 7, 2021

Some thoughts today on email, how to achieve - and maintain! - inbox zero, along with the stress-relief that brings. Also how I manage work/life balance that way, including organizational tips.

You can watch the You Tube video of the podcast here (https://youtu.be/BsNnhTtbrgg).

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:01

Good morning everyone. This is Jeffy Kennedy, author of fantasy romance and romantic fantasy. I'm here with my first cup of coffee. Which is delightful. Delightfully good. So how are you guys? Let's see. It is Wednesday, April 11th. I'm just combobulated. Um, you guys know how much I'm a a creature of ritual, right? And uh you'll like having the vacation mini break extend through Monday. I I keep forgetting today is Tuesday. Or see, I keep thinking today is Tuesday. Um, forgetting that it's Wednesday. It's not a big deal, it's just like on um Wednesdays is the day that I uh weigh the cats and do my body measurements. So, I mean, clearly not a huge deal, but um, I nearly forgot this morning. Um, Jackson always acts like I'm doing something terrible to him. He just like crouches down. Uh I'm Isabel, I can have her just walk up to the I just use my bathroom scale. She'll walk up to it and she'll just sit on there and look all queenly. Jackson, I've been trying to teach him to do it himself. Otherwise, what I do is I hold him, you know, and do do my weight without him and my weight with him and do the math. Um, but I'm trying to get him to do it himself. So now he'll last couple times I've gotten him to get on there and he'll he'll get on and he'll like try to keep one paw off, and then he'll hunch down and be like, oh, I don't know. He's just like a little kid. He's like, just sure I'm doing something terrible to him. And I'm like, what? Nothing negative has ever happened to you with this bathroom scale, but he's utterly convinced. So, so yesterday I I got a lot done. I did all kinds of um business, caught up on email, caught up on Cepha. Uh, you know, the whole method to my particular madness is is the incremental daily work. Uh, when people ask me how I can get so much done, um, I never get as much done as I'd like, but you know, people ask me that. Um, but part of how I do it is I try to do a little bit on everything all the day. I'm not that that didn't even make sense. What are words? I try to do a little bit on everything every day. Thank you, Jeffy. Um, and I even have it sort of like compartmentalized on my to-do list so that you know, like I try to put in half an hour on Sappho every day. Um I try to, I I shoot for inbox zero. Uh so I try to keep my inboxes cleaned out. They're not entirely cleaned out right now. I think I've got like three, four, and two in my various emails. Three, four, two, and then there's a one. Um, for those of you, I know I don't understand how you guys can keep emails in your email boxes. Uh, for me, um an email in my inbox is a to-do item. It means I need to take action on it. And so if there gets to be too many, I really start to feel that pressure. One way that I deal with that I get to inbox zero is I do that that organizational tip of um, you know, like when you pick up a piece of paper, you're cleaning up, you pick up a piece of paper, that you have to do something with it, that you have to make a final decision for what you do with it. This one is sitting here because it's in my pile of things that need to be dealt with. Um, so it, I mean, I I'm obviously don't follow this all the time. Although I'm pretty close. I'll show you guys. This is a $5 off coupon for Ace Hardware, uh, thanking us for continuing to patronize them during the pandemic, and we can use it all the way down through the end of May. So I know I want to keep it. I need to put it somewhere where we'll remember to use it. Probably my bill fold. In fact, I'm gonna set it over here because as soon as I'm done with the podcast, I'm gonna put it in my billfold, and that way we'll have it. So here is my pile of things. There. Oh, yeah, now you can see. Here's my pile of things that like need to be dealt with. There's magazines underneath, it's not that bad. Mostly it's bills that need to be filed. Oh, I just popped up my power cord. Excuse me, I'm not outside today because it's um cold wind blowing. A cold wind blows. There we go. So I'm still tethered, as it were. Um yeah, so so that's the one touch method really does help, makes a big difference. Um, don't procrastinate on making the decision of what to do with the thing. So when I go through email, which I do try to save for afternoons, um, and I try to I try not to go through it multiple times. Um, I need to get better about that because once I open it, I tend to leave it open and deal with emails as they come in, and I don't think that's very productive. So, but what you do is you go through and you read an email and you make a decision about it. Um, so you either answer it right then, or you what I do is I sometimes will file it and then add a note to my to-do list. Um that way I don't have to-dos in multiple places. I mean, it's still a to-do, but it's um, I don't know, it just helps me at least have inbox zero. So, so yeah, there's a few things in there that I could probably move out and and deal with. So, anyway, coming back from a trip, I have all these things built up from because I don't have my incremental daily work on them. But I did get my front matter done. I got I got a lot of things off of my list yesterday, and I should get the rest off today. I am just right now waiting for the proofed copy of Sorcerer's Queen to come in. I paid for it, so that's done. Uh, but yeah, once that comes in, then I need to get that turned around and ready for formatting. And then I'm gonna go see my mom this weekend. So it's busy travel time for us. I feel like I didn't put enough stevia in my latte. If that's why I'm not making my usual yummy faces, that's why. So, I mean, in some ways it works out well, you know, this interim time. I need to start writing Bright Wizard. Bright Wizard. God, my words are just all over the place. Bright Wizard would be funny. Bright Familiar. Sequel to Dark Wizard. Uh, I need to get that lined up. Um, I've I made a decision yesterday to, I'm looking at my calendar, to reset the start date on that. I'm not gonna start it till next week. So this week I'm just devoting myself to um getting all the piddly things done. Getting everything ready for this book to launch. Um, and then I will switch my mind space over. Uh the only downside of getting the cover for Sorcerer's Queen and the Pirate Rogue so late, and it was just because of Raven's schedule, and I I was absolutely zen with that. That's I I would have liked to have it sooner, but that was when I could get on her schedule, and so I was like, okay, great. But I've got it up on my desktop, and I like this cover so much. Jack's expression just it delights me. I was trying to think of a way to describe it. I love how um kind of amused and smug and knowing he looks. Um I I like that Stella is kind of like off in her her own world, and Jack's there going, like, yeah, yeah, that's me. That well, if you when you read the book, you'll know what he's smug about. So um what else? I almost didn't do the podcast today, uh, except my mother was like already texting me, asking me if I'd done it yet, uh, because I don't feel like I have a whole lot to say. I was gonna say something more about email uh and managing email. I was reading a very interesting article about um email fatigue and how companies are trying to deal with it because one of the things that causes stress is people having a lot of emails and even when they go on vacation, I might sneeze, I'm a little sneezy. That cold wind. Thank you. See if I'm done. Okay. Um, oh, I haven't done earrings either. And and here I'm like trying to think of stuff to say. Uh, but let on that note with um email stuff, that even when people go on vacation and they really need that break, and companies are are starting to take that very seriously, which is great, you know, that we need that decompressed time. Uh, but even if people aren't checking their email on vacation, which was a big thing for a long time, uh, that they found that there was still the feeling of stress because people knew that emails were piling up in their inboxes. And and I remember that from the day job too, you know, like coming back from vacation and, you know, having not just my personal email, but you know, like all of the emails in the work inbox and how it would feel. I mean, you'd just like come crashing down from that nice big relaxed vacation high, and you'd be like, oh my god, how can I possibly deal with all of these? And so I thought this was very interesting. One of the measures that some companies were doing, which I was, which I think is a great idea, is that they had come up with an auto-responder that would say that would basically reject the email. And it would say, um, the person who you're trying to reach is on vacation right now and your email has been deleted. Please contact them after this date. And and I thought, well, that's that's really brilliant, because then you don't have this avalanche facing you. And one of the things they found was that people were perfectly fine. The senders of the emails were perfectly fine with doing that. You know, it's like, and I know I do this all the time. Like, I'll, you know, email my agent over the weekend just because something's on my mind. And I'll say, you know, don't look at this until next week. But I was thinking about XYZ. You know, and it's like, I wonder if it would be nice to have the tech. I mean, those of us who are not in companies, it would be nice to have that tech saying your email has been deleted, um, contact me after. You know, there's there's all of the like newsletters and informational things, so I don't know what you'd do with that. I guess you can't. Um I was gonna pursue one more thought there. It'd be nice to have it. Oh, but I also think maybe we need to like adjust our our etiquette, our our social interactions on that kind of thing. Uh, because I remember as uh as a child when we only had landline telephones, oh my best beloved, back in the day, uh, that there was fairly rigid etiquette on, at least I was taught, you know, that you didn't call anyone after 10 o'clock at night and you didn't call anyone before like seven in the morning. Um, and and you kind of knew different people what their schedules were, but you know, because the landline would ring, there wasn't a way to silence it unless you unplugged the phone. You could see it in broadcast news. For for you, for you children out there who who have not, I'm sure you guys are all familiar with this, you know, because you do see these movies, but um, in broadcast news, you know, like Holly Hunter would unplug the the phone in her hotel room and and loop the cord up under the receiver. So you do that so that the cord didn't go slipping away from you, right? You put it under there. And so she would do that so she wouldn't be disturbed, and then she would have her crying jag and then she would be done. Um so yeah, I mean, when you know that their phone is going to ring if you call, then you develop a certain um etiquette around being polite. And I wonder if we should start doing that with email. That, you know, like you, I mean, yeah, it's it's harder to know, right? But I think there's this feeling that because the email goes silently into someone's inbox, that it's not an invasion, and and it turns out it is. So anyway, those are all my thoughts on email. Email and work-life balance. Today's earrings are these pretty amber ones that square, just very simple square amber set in silver, nice opening on the back to allow the light through. You guys are getting all studied up on jewelry. They're pretty though. Um, they catch nice light in my ears. I went to a real amber kick for a while, and I believe I bought these for myself on a work trip. I don't recall where. And I have this pretty amber bracelet that matches. I also don't recall where I got it. Both of these remind me, I feel like these, you know, you can't use jewelry cleaner on amber. And I wonder if there's some kind of cleaner I can use on these. Because, see, I don't know if you could tell. You probably can't tell on the video. You certainly can't tell if you're only on podcasts. See how that's a little bit cloudy on the top. I'll just see if there's a a way to polish up amber. These do not have the opening on the back, and I think the bracelet would be prettier if it did. Uh, with this is like my second amber bracelet, and it's the replacement bracelet. I had bought an amber bracelet for myself in Madison, Wisconsin, that was a little bit more of a golden color. And I'm here to try to get this to latch again. There we go. And I just loved it, and it had the openings on the back, and it was for some reason stuck out in my mind as one of the first times that I bought a piece of jewelry for myself. It was on a work trip. And I was like, I want this bracelet and I'm gonna buy it for myself. And then I was I went from there to visit my mom and her then boyfriend of the time, and we were touring around, um, I don't even remember where, and it was in the south, doing like a little mini break. And we stopped at this gas station and got back in the rental car, and we were on the road, and I realized that the bracelet was no longer on my wrist. And I and I knew it must have slipped off my wrist in the gas station, and I said I wanted to go back, and the uh the then boyfriend wouldn't. He was like, oh uh, he could be cranky sometimes. And I was always kind of annoyed about that. You like these things that you should let go, you know. It's like, okay, this was what oh my god, how long ago was it? Uh more than 20 years. You know, it's like at some point you have to let it go, right? You can't be annoyed about this for the rest of your life. Uh the art of losing turns out is hard to master. Uh, you get points if you can ID that reference. I should have like your points go to something real. So, um, so yeah, this morning I'm going to update my map for the uh for Sorcerer's Queen. And I am going to do all the things while I wait for this to come in, the proofed version. And I mean, my hair looks kind of not wonderful today because I'm getting my hair done this afternoon. And uh it's always better not to wash it, you know, so that the dye sticks better. So tomorrow, tomorrow I will be beautiful. Um, I will say, you may have noticed I don't have polish on my nails. I did go in to get my manicure yesterday, and my my wonderful nail tech who I've been with for a number of years now, I really love her. Um, she actually has to have uh hysterectomy um kind of emergency, and she's going to be out for six weeks. And I'm like, oh no, but what about me? What about my needs? Um, and so we we kind of went back and forth, and we decided she's we decided the easiest thing was just to give my nails a rest. You know, because she's like, you could go to somebody else, and I'm like, I don't want anybody else, I only want you. Um so she just took all of my polish off and just put like a clear coat on there, and um, I'll just wait for her to come back. So uh the vicissitudes of life, right? Okay, I will remind you all that first cup of coffee is part of the Frolic Media Podcast Network, and you will find more podcasts you love over there at frolic.media slash podcasts. I will talk to you all tomorrow. Take care. Bye bye.