About Dan Markovitz
Dan Markovitz is the founder and president of TimeBack Management. Prior to founding his own firm, Mr. Markovitz held management positions at Sierra Designs, Adidas, CNET and Asics Tiger. Learn More...
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Leveling; smoothing out the flow; e.g., doing two performance evaluations a day for 3 weeks, rather than ten a day for three days -- and then needing to take a vacation because you're so burned out.
Overburdening people, process, or equipment; e.g., people working 100 hour weeks for months on end -- come to think of it, like most lawyers and accountants.
Uneveness or variability; e.g., leaving work at the normal time on Thursday, but having to stay at the office till midnight on Friday because the boss finally got around to giving you that project...at 4:30pm.
Waste; activities that your customer doesn't value and doesn't want to pay for; e.g., billing your customer for the really expensive 10am FedEx delivery because you didn't finish the document on time.
TIMEBACK BLOG 
Cutting the (electronic) umbilical cord.
Posted November 24, 2008 @ 11:09 AM
Last week I wrote about the difficulty people have in unplugging from their email:
I've preached the gospel of setting aside uninterrupted work time to my clients, but with limited success. Environmental factors -- among them, the (perceived) need to seem immediately responsive, the fear of missing an urgent email, the desire to have one's direct reports jump when called -- and long-established work habits overwhelm the new ideas.
So what is to be done?
That's not a simple question to answer. There are many ways to improve the situation, depending on your particular work environment, your particular work requirements, and -- most importantly -- your idiosyncratic personal needs.
In general I eschew technological solutions to what are fundamentally human problems. However, recently I've been testing a web tool called Away Find which goes a long way towards reducing the anxiety produced by stepping away from your email. Without getting into too much detail, Away Find enables people who insist (absurdly) on using email when they need you right now to find you on your cell phone.
It's worth a try, and not just because it will give you a bit more confidence when you try to put some distance between your brain and your inbox. My guess is that you'll also realize that, well, the world will keep revolving even without your tender, second-by-second ministrations to its needs. And once you realize that, you'll truly be free to make some time to create some value for your customers.