The Essential Message Blog

The EM Diet

When I was a kid, I could eat anything and stay skinny as a rail. But once I hit my late teens, I started to...ahem...fill out. I am short, and have a small frame. 5 pounds on me LOOKS like 5 pounds. By the time I hit my mid-twenties, I'd gone from a wiry 95lbs to a sturdy, puffy 140lbs, most of it around my middle.

Thing is, I was anything but a junk-food junkie. Sure, I ate some "fun food" now and then, but for the most part my diet was low fat, lacto-ovo vegetarian. I ate eggs, low-fat dairy, and lots of whole grain pasta and bread. I religiously checked nutrition labels, selecting foods that fit the high-fibre, low-fat criteria that the media and the health community assured me would guarantee good health and a trim waistline. Butter, to me, was the Antichrist in spreadable form. Still, the weight kept coming.

Zen And The Art Of Email Maintenance, Part 2

Welcome, grasshopper, to your second lesson in email management. We have learned how to manage our inboxes, and therefore be better receivers. Now we are going to travel further along the path to electronic enlightenment and learn how to be better senders, through the teachings known as The Four Noble Email Truths. As Buddha says: Through poorly structured emails you may 'solve' one problem, but you           sow the seeds for another.

Zen And The Art Of Email Maintenance, Part 1

Email interrupting your workflow? Inbox interfering with your inner peace? If you're like most of us, your answer is a weary, defeated "yes". While email has certainly simplified communication and is a valuable business tool, it can also be a cruel, cruel mistress. How many of us have opened our email program only to be overrun by a bloody onslaught of new messages - messages that add even more chaos to the already message-ridden battlefield that our inbox has become - and beat a hasty retreat, vowing to deal with them later?

Never fear, grasshopper. In this first installment of Zen and the Art of Email Maintenance, we will look to the East and discover the 5 Precepts of Email Management; how to, as Buddha put it, be master of email rather than mastered by email. (I may be paraphrasing here - some of these old, dusty scrolls are hard to read.)