How checking Email more than 3 times a day is killing your Productivity
Does your heart beat a tad faster when that notification icon on your mobile goes off to give you a whiff of new emails?
Do you find yourself impulsively switching to your inbox to scan it every few minutes?
Are you in the compulsive habit of scanning the list of emails, speed-reading some and switching back-and-forth across emails?
If your answer was a “yes” to any of the above, then you may be wasting precious time of atleast a couple of hours every single day. These seemingly innocuous habits could be eating up well over 20% of your productive hours. You can start reclaiming these hours with a few simple steps, starting today.
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect — Mark Twain
Elevation of emails to the Centre of our work universe
Emails, supposedly just another medium of communication have risen to occupy the centre of our work lives. So much so that they now dictate and control what deems our attention, on a minute-by-minute basis.
Anything that is not on our email or calendar is most often relegated to oblivion, maybe until another email bumps it up back into our realm of starved attention. Don’t we all feel that a work day is not productive until “you’ve cleared your inbox”.
“Being busy is a form of laziness; lazy thinking and indiscriminate action” says entrepreneur and best-selling author Tim Ferriss in the ‘4-Hour Workweek’.
After all it is easy to drum up ‘inbox zero’ and ‘no emails unanswered’ policy to such a frenzy that they start getting counter-productive. More so, in the digital age of remote work where emails are no longer just a way to communicate, but have become a reflection of one’s identity in an organization.
Poor email etiquettes, unscrupulous CC-all and micro updates add to the inbox clutter, and get us deeper into this stranglehold of information overload.
As a net effect, we have ended up with a compulsive urge to send and consume emails. Whats also troubling is that emails which are a means to an end, often end up becoming the primary objective each day, for most of us.
It is vain to do with more what can be done with less. — William of Occam, originator of “Occam’s Razor”
Who stole my time?
At the end of another busy and seemingly engaging day on your inbox, if you end up wondering what happened to your time and what you’ve really accomplished, its a strong indication of being trapped deep in this vicious cycle.
“There is not enough time to do all the nothing we want to do.” — Bill Watterson
1. Battle of the inboxes
A daily goal of Inbox zero is gamification gone utterly wrong. An attempt to stay on top of emails as they come, quickly decomposes into a game of ping-pong rallies, albeit against 10 people, all at once. This is a game we wouldn’t want to win in the first place.
Hyper-responsiveness to emails is an acute need felt to respond first, but at a deeper level is due to an insecurity as to what could be lurking in one’s inbox. But, the faster you respond, the more emails you’ll get and this only fuels the urge. Email then transforms into a source of anxiety and constant stress.
Hours of pushing paper around not only leaves one exhausted, but has a multiplying effect across the organization, by keeping more people busy but just not productive. Blindly running after efficiency robs one off effectiveness.
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention — Herbert Simon
2. Attending to the loudest scream
Imagine that you are working on an important activity, and midway an email notification pops up. It previews a hot-headed response by a colleague to one of your emails. Teased away from the critical, you find this impossible to ignore, and jump ship right into the email volley to give it back, right then.
By letting emails drive the flow of your day’s work and yielding to the ones screaming most for attention, it is the strategic ones you often sacrifice. Such lopsided priorities make you spend disproportionate time focusing on the seemingly urgent, often at the cost of what’s more important.
What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important — Dwight D. Eisenhower
3. Achieving less by focusing on more
Its common wisdom that immersion in an activity boosts throughput and results. That email pop-up not only steals attention from a critical activity, but also leads to interrupted task-switching, a productivity-killer and worst form of multitasking, as per the American Psychological Association.
“It takes 25 minutes to recover from a phone call or an e-mail, researchers have found, and yet the average person receives such an interruption every 11 minutes. Which means that we’re never caught up; we’re always out of breath, running behind” says Pico Iyer, an American essaying and novelist.
Research shows that interruptions consume over 28% of the average worker’s day, leading to over 2 hours of productive time lost every single day. Mistaking this for multi-tasking, unaware leaders routinely rob teams of hundreds of productive hours, through such interruptions.
The effectiveness of work increases according to geometric progression if there are no interruptions. — Andre Maurois
4 Steps to Reclaiming your productive work hours
Impulsively checking your inbox is a malaise that you can grow out of. As with most behavioral issues, change begins with an acute awareness of the huge and largely avoidable cost, one has been paying for these mistakes.
It is also important to assure oneself that not all emails are worthy of your immediate attention. Business emergencies do occur, but its a defeatist outlook to model your work rhythm anticipating its occurrence every single day. This only forces you to live in constant anxiety of the improbable.
In the words of Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool”. By adopting a few simple but decisive steps, one can start moving upstream against the current.
1. Never start your day on the Inbox
Diving into the inbox first thing in the morning may be the most tempting thing to do for anyone. But this is the worst injury you can inflict on yourself, as we’ve seen with the uncontrollable chain reactions that emails can set off.
Instead, start your day by making a list of tasks for the day by reflecting on your priorities. Tap into the reserve of high energy at the start of the day by getting cracking on those critical activities that demand undivided attention.
Use your todo list as the primary driver for your work, and keep adding or crossing off items off it, through the day. There are plenty of helpful apps around, like Evernote, Trello, Todoist. I’ve also found it helpful to pin the app or retain this on a primary browser tab, and dislodge your mail client.
A schedule defends from chaos and whim — Annie Dillard
2. Subjugate the inbox to just feed into your Todo list
Having established your psychological dominion over emails, command them now to feed inputs to your Todo list, solely based on priority. I find it most productive to skim emails an hour after starting work, with the focused sole objective of picking out items for your day’s work queue.
This needs some practice and self-control to avoid jumping into emails right then. One just needs to evaluate whether something is critical enough to add to your task list. If nothing stands out, go back to working on your earlier priorities. All other emails and routine responses can wait.
You might need to refer to past emails as part of work, and may also have to send emails to close loop on priorities. This is where apps such as inboxwhenready, inboxpause can help, by keeping your inbox hidden while you search or compose emails. You could also go without these apps, with some discipline and distracted scanning while operating on emails.
The concept of being always reachable makes us present nowhere — Peter Aravai
3. Batch the emails and cut right through them in a single sitting
About 4 hours after you start your day, roughly before or after lunch is when the inbox needs your attention. Plan a block of immersive inbox clearing to read and immediately respond to items, with as minimal context switching as possible.
Plan your third and final bout of emails towards the end of your business day to wrap up, and add lower priorities to the next day’s queue. It is a misplaced notion that you’re doing disservice by wilfully aggregating emails for action, as is also the notion that you’re being efficient by being the first responder.
Letting emails age and by batching them together at a single go gives an unexpected, significant boost to your productivity. One can now cut through emails like a hot knife through butter. Most importantly, the effectiveness also shoots up. In the first few days of this rhythm, the feeling is almost magical, for one gets a sense of truly being in command at work and achieving more.
What gets measured gets managed — Peter Drucker
4. Turn off all those notifications
As you rejig your work & communication flow map, the final piece in this puzzle is to dismantle other mechanisms of interruption that could steal your attention. And there are enough of them created in the form of notifications and alerts, for the attention-famished audience.
To retain complete control, disable all forms of push notifications. Do this on your email client, mobile and anywhere a running tally of unread items could potentially be displayed. Blissful were those days where one had to dial-up to connect to the internet and do a manual refresh to send/receive emails.
There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant — Ralph Waldo Emerson.
In Summary
The above principles apply not just to emails, but also to its many cousins adopted now at work. Think of communicators like Hangouts or Skype, messaging platforms like Slack or WhatsApp, they are ubiquitous and purport to serve the same purpose.
However, for the very same reasons described above, technology when placed at the centre of our universe and handed full control to run our lives can make us run amuck, ruin the mental peace and also wreck productivity.
To disarm any last pockets of resistance, imagine these mindless pursuits to be not different from that of a mule blindly chasing the carrot dangling in front of it. Neither will it get the carrot, nor will it feel contended, for once in life.
Rephrasing the words of Gretchen Rubin, the bestselling author on happiness and human nature:
“Turn off your email; turn off your phone; disconnect from the Internet; figure out a way to set limits so you can concentrate when you need to, and disengage when you need to. Technology is a good servant but a bad master.”
