HRB5M Syndrome

What is this HRB5M syndrome? What are its symptoms? Is it contagious? Who will be affected by this? What is the cure? What is the prognosis of this syndrome?

Did I catch your attention? Am I scaring you by coming up with an unknown disease name? Will you run to your doctor to get yourselves checked?

Before you hit the gas pedal and run off to the doctor finish reading this blog post.

HRB5M – Hit Refresh Button every 5 Minutes. This is the syndrome that I am affected by and based on my conversations with other entrepreneurs it looks like everyone else who are in this entrepreneurial boat are affected by this. What does this mean – I refresh my email every 5 min (as a matter of fact even more frequently) and the reason I do this is to check if there is any customer complaint, if there is any sale made or if there is any other email that needs urgent attention. As a matter of fact all emails to me need immediate attention and I am so addicted to responding to an email that I can boast my SLA levels be way way higher (counter productive). Now is this syndrome limited to only email client only – now this syndrome has slowly impacted my Facebook page as well. I refresh my Facebook page every 5 min to see if there is any comment posted on my FB page or if I have added any new fan. Once I find any new interaction I start slicing and dicing the activity – go deeper in to why anyone has posted any particular comment and if anyone has become a fan then what are his/her connections that my company can go after.

So the symptoms for this syndrome are frequent visits to different pages and refreshing the pages, extreme anxiety in case of any non activity on the pages one visits and a penchant to stick to high levels of SLAs. With these symptoms is this syndrome contagious – as a matter of fact once you enter into the entrepreneurship race you are affected by this – at least my studies have shown this (my sample size is around 10). But the question is – is this contagious. So technically speaking this is contagious but it does not spread by contact or from one entrepreneur to another – it affects a person just because he/she joins this bandwagon.

Is there a cure? Will the big pharma companies jump onto this and invest millions to reap billions?  As for the cure the only way I can get away from this syndrome is to turn off the computer and get busy in other activities – working on strategic alliances, meeting with customers or business development. But still one part of me keeps wondering whether there has been any new activity on the email front or on the Facebook front. Now the question is will this subside or increase with my company growing – my guess is on the contrary it will increase and also the number of channels increasing I would guess it keeps growing. The only solution for this is some discipline – have a strict regimen of email and Facebook dose, when one can check and to set expectations so that your ecosystems knows when to expect a reply or response from you. Now the ball is my court!!!