What Consumes Your Time

As many of you know, lots of my time is consumed by preventing and filtering spam. Necessary evil, but if your hosting e-mail it is a necessity.

A also have a number of other clients who have their own time consuming, non producing activities. Take one of my clients - Aileen Minor. Aileen runs a business selling antiques, lots of furniture and stuff for the garden. I found that one thing that consumes lots of Aileen's time is dealing with inquiries that folks make about the valuation of their antique. Typically the requests include some vague reference to what it looks like, maybe a bit of history and just enough information to tell that its an antique, but not much else.

These are Antiques Roadshow types of people hoping to find a fortune in grandma's junk pile and hoping they came up with some sort of national treasure or something. To do a proper valuation of an antique requires hours of work and research, sending photos back and forth, conversation and detailed descriptions of the antiquity. According to Aileen, this can take lots of time. Most of the time, people end up feeling a bit disappointed because she can't get back to them fast enough or they find out their "prize" would be worth about 2 bucks.

So I guess I don't have it so bad filtering out e-mail, I id where it comes from and whammo, its blocked!

posted by Matt @ 5:18 PM