Keeping in Touch: Final Update

Photo by Infrogmation.

Photo by Infrogmation.

For anyone just tuning in, this summer I’ve been attempting to be more diligent about keeping in touch with friends and family members who live far away. It’s been an interesting experiment. Today I’ll be sharing my thoughts on the process as we get ready to say good-bye to August.

I’ve learned that I really dislike preprinted greeting cards. The companies that produce them tend to make a lot of assumptions: sick people always recover, birthday cards must either be mushy or raunchy, and  condolence cards must be religious.  It makes me wish that one of these companies would hire me to come up with new ideas for them. There are a lot of holes in their coverage.

I wasn’t a big fan of the types of things that they tended to make jokes about. Boob and beer jokes work for some situations, but after a while they became repetitive. While blank cards are always an option, it sure would be nice if they had better competition.

Postcards don’t seem to have this problem. Almost all of them are neutral enough to suit any purpose.  For the time being I’m not planning to give Canada Post quite so much business, but the next time I do need to buy something like a greeting card I think I will be checking the postcard section first.

The reason why I didn’t use e-cards during the course of this experiment is that most of the people I was communicating with aren’t at all technologically savvy. I’ve already switched to e-cards for everyone my parents age or younger, but there are some older people in my social circles who can’t make that adjustment. Maybe someday!

Last month I mentioned wanting to improve my email response times. To be honest, I’ve only shortened the amount of time it takes me to clear through my email by a little bit. I think the problem is that I try to do it all in one sitting, so this autumn I’m going to try to break it down into much smaller amounts of time. If I can spent 2 minutes a day archiving and deleting old emails I think it will be much easier for me to keep on top of it.

The care package has been pushed back to this autumn. I’ve decided to include Canadian chocolate in it and want to make sure it doesn’t melt while in transit. It’s going to be exciting to see who likes what!

How have your summers been? What have you done to keep in touch?

See also:

How Do You Keep In Touch?

Keeping In Touch Update #1

Keeping In Touch Update #2.

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