I’m happy to say that I’m not addicted to e-mail. Or at least I don’t think I am.

However, I’ve come to realize that communicating through email is preferred to picking up the telephone by a fairly large margin. In fact, I actually prefer it as it lets me keep a written record of communication, not necessarily for legal purposes, but for organizational purposes.

During a typical day, I get so focused on the job at hand that if you want me to do something, you better send me an email. Why? Because in the process of verbally adding a task to my list, you’ve probably interrupted the process of closing another one out. Chances are, I didn’t stop long enough to divert my brain from what it’s focused on to what you’re requesting of it. Consequently, the response is: “Sure thing, could you send that to me in an email?”

Since most of my work occurs away from my desk, my laptop is dedicated to receiving task requests and discriminately prioritizing the requests in chronological order. It’s a beautiful system I have set up, and it works rather well. Unless of course you’re the one that has so rudely interrupted me and asked me to add one more thing to my list, thereby doing an end run on my system!

Lucky for me, my company has not found it necessary to issue my a BlackBerry. I consider myself lucky because I see the crack-berry effect on those who do have a PDA strapped to their hip. They just never turn it off!

Weekend Work

I’ve made it a practice not to check work email on the weekend, and at least if I do, not to respond to any.

It seems that management at some companies are seeing the evil ways of the email, and are striving to add clarity to the line between work and personal life. In fact, employees at PricewaterhouseCoopers caught logging in to their email system on weekends are met with a popup window indicating that it is, in fact, the weekend, and not to overload yourself with email.

I think it’s a good policy. After all, if you can’t get it done between Monday and Friday, what’s another couple days?

What say you? Are you addicted to email? Any organization tips?

Business, Organization, Technology email, work

It’s that time of year again. Holiday cheer, Christmas shopping in conjunction with raiding the left over Halloween candy isle at the grocery store, and oh yeah, open enrollment for benefits at work. Blehhhh.

That’s probably my least favorite administrative task at work. Pick a health plan. There’s only three, they’re all free, but if you foresee yourself needing this little benefit in fine print, you need the “premier blue” plan, but that comes with an additional $500 deductible, a smaller approved doctors lists…

…and this is where I lose interest.

To its credit, my company spends a lot of time and money making sure I know how to best take advantage of the benefits plan. Seminars for health, dental, vision, employee stock purchase plan, 401(k), pension, flexible spending accounts. You name it, there’s an informative meeting on it.

I don’t mean to belittle the process, it just seems that I spend an awful lot of time trying to determine whether I need to change things up a bit, only to leave them the same.

Ironically, I was browsing through the online Journal this morning and came across an article by Terri Cullen concerning this very subject.

She says that the biggest mistake many employees make is that when faced with a decision on which health plan to pick, they don’t pick any of them. That mistake could leave them with no coverage for an entire year, regardless of the differences in copay.

Incidentally, Cullen mentions that the biggest reason that companies are pushing their employees to be more up to speed on their benefits options is because they’re pushing more of the health care costs on to the employees themselves. Plan deductibles are rising, and many companies are providing a health savings account plan.

I understand that health care costs are rising, and I don’t necessarily expect the employer to absorb all of the cost increases. However, it does force one to look farther out into the future and try to account for events that may ding your wallet, aside from the typical doctors visit or late night trip to the ER for a broken wrist.

An interesting change change of the times indeed, and perhaps more a reason to pay attention in those open-enrollment seminars.

Business, Health and Fitness, Insurance 401(k), bennies, Business, health plans, health savings account, work, work benefits