When we don’t control our email habit, we are controlled by it.
-Coping With Email Overload
What’s the first thing you do in the morning? Do you reach over to grab your phone to see what messages you may have missed while your body so annoyingly required sleep?
Is it possible that the feeling of being overloaded by email is something that we’ve created ourselves? We’ve all got smartphones which give us up-to-the-second information…even if that second is at six in the morning or nine o’clock at night.
In the article I referenced above, Coping With Email Overload, the author talks about going on vacation and not having internet or phone access for a week. First of all, the world didn’t stop spinning on its axis. Secondly, he was much more focused on his email when he had hundreds of them to address rather than checking his email on his phone…only to actually respond to the same email later on when he got to his computer.
He was doing something that I think we all do…double-dipping. Read emails on the phone and then re-read them later when we actually have time to craft a well thought out response. What if we only did the work once? What if we set up a system for addressing emails that allowed us to feel like we had more control of our work lives?
An email management suggestion
Check it three times a day for a certain amount of time. The article suggests thirty minutes, but I think I’d need more at the beginning and end of the day. So I’m going to try (I’m a notorious phone-checking bandit!) an hour in the morning when I first open up my email, then a half an hour midday, and back to an hour before I shut the ole computer down for the day.
What does this mean?
I probably means that I don’t need to sit at my desk with my phone right next to me waiting for beeps and dings to tell me that I’ve received an email. It also probably means I’ll be more focused on the task at hand when I’m going through emails. There’ve been times when I’m diligently answering emails, only to be disturbed by my phone letting me know that I’ve received an email on another account. Not exactly the most high-functioning way to work!
Outliers
What if there’s an urgent email that requires my immediate attention? Maybe there are some of you out there who receive those sort of emails, but I’m not that important. In my mind, I may create a world where I get emails that need to be answered ASAP, but in reality, they can all wait a few hours.
It seems like vacations could be a time where we’d have to rely on our phones a bit more than necessary. That seems okay, right? For a week or two, we can break from the norm of managing our time well in order to make sure that nothing falls through the cracks.
What do you think? Is this feasible? Can we get more done by only checking email three times a day?
If you liked this post, check out Step Away From The Computer: Why Unplugging Will Keep You Sane and You Think You Can But You Can’t: On The Evils Of Multitasking.
