Let’s be honest: we all get way too much email. So much so that checking email has become a dirty chore, something many productivity experts say you should do 2-3 times a day tops, simply because it's a tremendous timesuck.  In professional communication, it’s all too common to send an email only to find that days later, the recipient didn’t take the time to read it or – worse – deleted it.

Before you blame them, ask yourself: did I make it easy for them to delete my email?  Was I too wordy?  Too many pleasantries?  The decision about what to do with your message may happen much quicker than you think.

Most email systems preview message content for the first 50-100 characters of the email.  So, as Steve Rubel suggests, try writing the first sentence of your email like a tweet.  Skip the introductory small talk and get right to the point.  Set your hook within 75 characters and you’ll have a far better chance of the reader giving your email the attention it deserves.

75 characters isn’t a lot, so this takes some practice.  I suggest heading over to a site like this that will give you a character count as you write your  hook.  Once you’ve got it pared down to a reasonable size, tab back to your email client and paste in what you’ve written.  (If you use Twitter regularly, you're probably familiar with what 75 characters looks like.)

It’s the attention economy these days. Instead of trying to fight it, learn to play better within its rules.

Go figure: focusing on a dozen things poorly, running from fragmented job to fragmented job, trying to shift mindsets from tactical to strategic and struggling to figure out where you left a certain task might have long-term negative effects.

After jumping through the mental hoops, the researchers found that the heavy multimedia users were at a disadvantage. Compared with those who rarely used more than one type of media at a time, heavy multitaskers had slower response times, most often because they were more easily distracted by irrelevant information, and because they retained that useless information in their short-term memory. While the delay was only about half a second in some tests, this could be enough to cause problems in everyday life, says Goodman, who is also an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "You're being flooded with too much information and you can't selectively filter out quickly which is important and which is not important," says Goodman.

So, to summarize the article:

• Heavy-multitaskers did worse on attention tests than non-multitaskers.
• Multitaskers are more easily distracted and susceptible to irrelevant information.
• Multitaskers often retain useless information in short-term memory.
• Negative effects from sustained multimedia multitasking may not be reversible.
• The good news: multitasking cannot cause ADHD, which is rooted in genetic susceptibility.

I can tell you this from a personal perspective: since becoming involved in job and hobbies that encourage and demand multitasking, I have a hard time with many of the things mentioned in the article. All the more reason mindfulness and relaxation will become necessary countermeasure skills as technology – and the pace of productivity – advances. (Via Dan Benjamin)

David Ulin, writing for the LA Times, perfectly soliloquizes the problems he’s been having sitting down to read.  I’ve been struggling with the same thing for about two years now:

So what happened? It isn't a failure of desire so much as one of will. Or not will, exactly, but focus: the ability to still my mind long enough to inhabit someone else's world, and to let that someone else inhabit mine. Reading is an act of contemplation, perhaps the only act in which we allow ourselves to merge with the consciousness of another human being. We possess the books we read, animating the waiting stillness of their language, but they possess us also, filling us with thoughts and observations, asking us to make them part of ourselves. This is what Conroy was hinting at in his account of adolescence, the way books enlarge us by giving direct access to experiences not our own. In order for this to work, however, we need a certain type of silence, an ability to filter out the noise.

Such a state is increasingly elusive in our over-networked culture, in which every rumor and mundanity is blogged and tweeted. Today, it seems it is not contemplation we seek but an odd sort of distraction masquerading as being in the know.

I won’t bullshit anyone: my issue is that I’d rather be reading feeds, articles, posts and writing my own stuff than reading longform books. I have amazing books sitting on the shelf – Infinite Jest, Consider the Lobster, Brain Rules, Transcend, The Ultramind Solution – and I just can’t get to them.  But I can read David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon College commencement speech twice a week.  That’s what it’s come to.

When I was younger – before the hyper-networked age came along and ruined those us prone to such ruining – I read books at a voracious rate.  Today, even getting through a really easy murder mystery is next to impossible.

(To be fair, the aforelinked book sucked, which might make it an unfair example.  But you get the point.)

If I were smart, I would have devoted myself to Infinite Summer.  Maybe that would have helped.

But I doubt it.

One of the best blog posts I’ve read in two years, courtesy of Jason Santa Maria.

TED has a very good talk by Tony Robbins about what shapes our behavior, what drives us to do what we do, and what fulfillment is all about.  Very much worth 20 minutes of your life, even if Tony Robbins conjures up too much motivational blowhardery (which he insists he's not, BTW.  And by that I mean he insists he's not a motivational speaker.  I don't know about blowhard.) (via Unfiltered)