Meeting in Person? What a Waste of Time!
I have to admit to being a bit of an Internet junkie. I'm always jonesing for a quick fix, a few clicks to check the latest headlines or scores or to see what new and interesting stuff might be floating around out there.
And in truth, it does interfere with my productivity, especially when I'm on deadline and dying to procrastinate in any way possible. Which is why I read Abhijeet Mukherjee's tips on how to break an Internet dependency with great interest, hoping to find some useful suggestions.
And yes, taking a one-day or longer vacation from going online seems reasonable. But one of his suggestions seemed horribly inefficient to me. Meet up with someone in person for a chat, rather than doing it online? What a waste of time!
Not to sound too cynical, but I believe that an awful lot of face-to-face meetings are black holes that suck the productivity out of my day. For example, I've got a client who wants me to drive out to his office, 45 minutes away, to discuss a project we're working on. The details are so straightforward that a simple e-mail (or -- gasp! -- an old-fashioned phone call) would suffice. Yet I'm going to spend an hour and a half in traffic, burning $4.69-per-gallon gas, to attend this 20-minute meeting.
In this case, I gotta defend the Internet as the more reasonable choice. So if using e-mail or chat can save me 90 minutes of downtime and be more environmentally conscious to boot, I guess I'm in no hurry to give that addiction up.