Recently I’ve been hibernating as I recover from a minor health blip that required a little surgery.

Just before Christmas I was told that I had stage 1 cervical cancer.  Not the best news (nobody likes the c word) but not the worst either – it was very early and could be treated all at once.  All that was required was removal of the cancerous tissue, and also they popped out a couple of lymph nodes to biopsy.  A week later I learned that the wonderful doctors have removed all the cancer and the nodes tested negative – so only 6 weeks after diagnosis it’s all gone.

Of course it wasn’t quite as easy as it appears in summary and the process was quite confronting at times.  Maybe I’ll write about that some other time.

One small enjoyment I discovered during my recovery sounds really obvious, but I honestly can’t remember a time when I would do this before.

Every day, I read all of the emails in my inbox, in one sitting.

And every day, I read all the new posts on my favourite blogs, from start to finish, in one sitting.

Previously, I would have my emails open in the background whenever I was on a computer and I would get notifications on my phone.  Every time I saw the number of unread emails I would feel tense. Shit, more I have to read. Same for my RSS feed of blog posts.  Instead of being interested and excited about what these wonderful writers had to share with me, it made me uncomfortable.  The number of unread items became overwhelming and therefore something I wanted to avoid.  In order to escape that feeling, I would scan through unread items as quickly as possible, just to get that number down.

But once I had the time to work through these items at leisure, the enjoyment returned.  I was excited once again to see what people had to share with me.  I could take the time to mull over new ideas and see how I might apply them in my life.  I opened each program (email and RSS feed) only once a day, and stayed there till I had read everything.  Then I shut them off and moved onto something else (such as watching these interviews with inspiring people!)

This is a practice I need to keep up, every day.  And even though I’m tempted to dismiss it now that I’m back at work (who has the time!) I know that’s just a cop out.  With almost two hours commute each day and plenty of time each evening (if I’m not distracted by TV…) there is absolutely no reason why I can’t make the time each day to catch up.

Such a habit ticks the boxes of self development and education, time management, finding inspiration and new ideas, being wholly in the moment and focused only on my present activity – the list goes on.

Laid out like that, and compared with the tension of letting unread items build up, it would be ridiculous of me to let this new habit lapse – am I right lads?