So I was sitting around the other day, catching up on some blogs that I haven’t read in a while. One of these is Steve Pavlina’s blog which I stopped reading for a while because it got a little to preachy/spirtual/his wife talks to dead people. But, he has had some really interesting stuff over the years so I thought I would see what he has been up too. I also happened to be watching the latest episode of Big Love and thinking about how crazy having multiple wives would be, financially, emotionally, sexually, etc. And I was thinking about how to have the benefits of multiple wives and not any of the trouble. And believe me, there would be trouble. And then Steve came right into my brain and smacked me around and gave me the answer, which would become my next 30 Day experiment. I would become, for the next 30 wonderful days, polyamorous.

What is Polyamory you ask? I had never heard of the word before, it wasn’t even in the dictionary until a few years ago. Well, according to Wikipedia,

The defining characteristic of polyamory is belief in the possibility of, and value of, multiple romantic loving relationships carried out “with the knowledge and consent of all partners concerned.”

My first thought, after picking myself off the floor, was “wwwoooooohhooooo!” It took a while, but eventually some perv.. errrr very loving man came up with a very intellectual word for sowing his seeds in other fields. What a great idea I thought. I’m sure most men have LOTS of love to give and just too few people (read:1) to share it with. Why not share it with as many people as I could, as many times as I could (Which at my age, is probably only once or twice). Revolutionary!

Now, the first thing you need, is a understanding wife. How Steve got his to go along with this, I have no idea. After that, basically a few lessons from Mystery and you are ready to hit the club scene to share your love. Again and again and again. Then when you are exhausted, go back home to your loving wife who supports you in everything you do.

So, my first step was to tell me wife that I was basically going to start seeing other women. But I still loved her and would expect her to behave herself and continue to be a great wife, at home. That is when I for the first time in my life, I had a object thrown at my head by my wonderful wife. Now, I don’t know if she was just firing a warning shot and that is why the shoe missed me, but I decided to make a quick retreat to the safety zone (garage). I hid behind the air compressor until I thought it was safe.

That turned out to be about 4 days, I got real hungry. I’ll put this one in the failure category.

Greatest Productivity Booster Ever.

Seriously, why does anyone check email more frequently. It takes me minutes a day to process, I see all of it at once and no one, not ONE person even noticed. In fact, I felt I kept up with people better because I could batch it all at once.

I might even limit myself to every two days now and see how it goes.

For the average person, I see no downside to email once a day. If you do tech support or something through email like that it may be a problem. But for the most part, I would highly recommend everyone try it out.

Here are the steps you can take.

1. Close your email program. Don’t set it to check more often, just close it!
2. Don’t worry about telling anymore, most people won’t notice.
3. Process your entire inbox once a day, don’t leave any emails that you can take care of immediately

I can’t believe I ever had my email set to check every minute. That was a waste of time.

So far, I am loving this email once a day thing. Every day, I check my mail around 4:00pm. instead of this trickle of email, I get a nice solid chunk of emails. I can respond to them all in usually about 10 minutes and that is it. I close my email, never to look at it again for 24 hours.

And no one seems to even notice.

Pretty much everyone agrees that we as humans suck at multitasking. You can do a bunch of stuff at once, but not very well. So people try and clean up their task lists and only do one at a time.

One task that gets forgotten in this cleanup and has become the silent lurker is email. Even when you think you are single tasking, you still have that darn email open. Forever trickling in, distracting you by the minute with worthless information. And that is already excluding all the spam and forwards you get. You probably get, what, one or two emails a day that really matter? And even those don’t need to be responded to immediately. You can sit on them for a day, maybe even more and not worry about them.

So I decided to get crazy and follow many people, though mostly Tim Ferriss’s advice, and stop checking email every minute. That’s right, I had my email set to check every minute of every day! I decided to check it once a day although he suggests cutting it back even more.

I realized that the time you decide to check it pretty important. You want to maximize the amount of email you get, so I decided to go for the late afternoon. That way I can respond to everything that has been sent during the day and people will be able to see my replies that evening (for all those suckers checking every minute!) and respond again.

I decided against an auto reply saying I would only check once a day and not even tell people. I wanted to see if people would explode from wondering what happened to me or issue an missing person’s report. This way I can see if it even mattered or if people would even notice since they are also being bombarded with email.

Well, I didn’t pass out while mowing the lawn. Thankfully. I felt like it a few times but I just drank some water. Here is a picture of me on the front porch during this process.

My 30 hour fast went OK. There was a point where I thought I would pass out any moment but then all of a sudden, I wasn’t really hungry anymore. Like a moment of hunger clarity.

When I was finished, I had a nice big burger. I recommend you do not do that, I didn’t feel so hot.

I ended up losing about 2 pounds, but that is only temporary I’m sure. Overall, it was a success, though I didn’t have any revelations or “Eureka!” moments regarding world peace or anything like that. I thought I would end up feeling more like this guy in the picture.