Paused Inbox Experiment Results

I consider myself a personal productivity enthusiast, and have been continuously improving my email management habits for years. At the end of 2020, I found my system fairly effective for managing emails, completing tasks on time, and making sure nothing falls through the cracks. The biggest thing I felt I could improve was the amount of time I was spending checking my email and getting distracted from other, and if I could be so frank to say, more important work. 

My system for 2020:

• All email notifications on my laptop and cell phone are turned off - including the mail icon that shows on the toolbar desktop app and the red notification counter on the phone app.
• Maintain inbox zero - at the end of every day my inbox should be empty. Sometimes, I will have emails to respond to the next morning that I will keep in my inbox.
• One folder for organizing email - All emails get either get deleted or moved to a "read" folder if I believe I may need to reference it later.
• One-touch emails (mostly) - Once I read an email, I try to follow David Allen's GTD methodology:

1. If the action will take less than two minutes, do it now (and delete the email or drag it to my 'read' folder)
2. If it will take between two and 15 minutes, add it to my task list (and move the email to my 'read' folder)
3. If it will take more than 15 minutes, add it to my calendar to complete later (and move the email to my 'read' folder)

• Check emails on an ad-hoc basis - mostly when I'm switching between activities or need a quick break.

My goal for January 2021: Only check email twice a day - once during lunch break and once at the end of the workday.

James Clear states (and every Industrial Engineer knows), "You don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems".

Here are my systems for January 2021:

• Use Boomerang's Inbox Pause to "pause" emails coming into my inbox and to share an "out of office" message that I may not receive their email immediately (and briefly explaining the experiment).
• Block time in my calendar to check emails and only check during those times.
• Move my Outlook app on my iPhone to the second screen and put it in a group of other messaging apps.
• Move the mail icon in Outlook. When I open Outlook, it defaults to opening my calendar and the options on the bottom-left of my screen are calendar, people, tasks, and notes. I have to click the three dots (…) to show more options, then I can click mail.

What happened:

I failed.

If I'm being honest with myself, there were probably only three or four days that I only checked email once or twice. There were another handful of days where I checked email three or four times. Most days were at least five times.

But as Neil Strauss says, "The cost of failure is… learning".

The top ten things I've concluded from my experiment:

1. Energy management needs to work in tandem with time management. There are going to be times when I only have a few minutes between meetings, or I need a break/coffee/snack and still want to be productive, and it doesn't make sense to get deep into work. At these times, it can help to review and action emails and not limit myself to checking emails twice a day. And in my opinion, checking emails is better than many alternatives (scrolling mindlessly through LinkedIn, for example).
2. I have little to no self-control. I'm the type of person that if you put a bowl of chips on the table, I'm going to eat more than my fair share. I may not be hungry, it may not even be my favourite flavour of chips, but because it's there, I'll reach for it. To that end, if there are shortcuts or workarounds, I will likely take them. Using the Inbox Pause functionality by Boomerang, it would still accept emails and put them in an "inbox pause" folder. I found myself opening this folder if I saw there were emails.
3. Old habits die hard. If I finish a meeting, creating a deliverable, solving a formula in Excel, whatever the work may be, I always checked email after. I've turned off all notifications and don't even see the mail icon on my Outlook toolbar anymore, but I would still check out of habit. This was a hard habit to break and I honestly didn't do a great job. When I opened my email, I'd often remind myself "that's right, you set this system up because you have more important things to do than check your email". Other times I would think to myself "well, I already have Outlook opened and I see some emails have come in, I might as well check them since I'm here".
4. Having time dedicated to checking emails scheduled in my calendar didn't help. (and I put everything in my calendar, I mean EVERYTHING). I rarely could wait until the scheduled time to check my email, unless I was in deep work.
5. "In the long run, the way you treat your time is the way others treat it too." - James Clear. I had a number of colleagues (and my wife, jokingly) say they didn't bother to email me first thing in the morning because they knew I wouldn't look at it until noon. I got this only after a week of implementing the system.
6. Putting an out of office compelled me to be accountable to myself. Every time I received an email outside of "email hours", the sender would receive an "out of office" message asking them to be patient and that I only check my emails during certain hours. It helped me stay true to my goal because I couldn't respond right away and contradict what I put in my out of office message.
7. Visual cues are effective. The same way a flashing icon on Teams guides me to open the desktop app, a red "X" on Outlook stops me from opening email and reminds me what's important.
8. Daily reminders are effective. I've dabbled with journaling on and off for the past eight years or so but it hasn't stuck. What has worked so far this year is an automated form that shows up in my inbox every morning and every evening. In the form, I ask myself a few key questions about my day related to my goals, including how many times I opened my email (1-2, 3-4, or 5+). Even though my results aren't great, it was a daily reminder of what are the most important things in my day.
9. The hardest part was first thing in the morning when starting the work day. What helped was putting my work in the calendar at the beginning of the week and tweaking the evening before for what needed to be done that day. I had those documents or spreadsheets open the night before so I could jump right in the next morning.
10. Moving things on my desktop and iPhone helped break my habit loop. If it was out of sight, it was out of mind. I didn't see the mail icon when I opened up Outlook to check my calendar, so I didn't mindlessly check email. On my phone, I didn't see Outlook on my main screen so I didn't mindlessly open it.
11. I know I said 10, but here's a bonus! I setup a LinkedIn poll asking "Do you use the 'work offline' functionality for Outlook (or something similar for another email software)?" The results are shown in the top of this article, but of 518 views, only 1 person said they use it regularly and another person has used it before. I believe it's an extremely underused functionality that can help people stay focused when using Outlook for activities other than receiving email (calendars, tasks, people, referencing old emails, etc.).

Based off my experiment and conclusions, there are 5 changes I'm making for the month of February:

1. Use the "work offline" functionality until I'm ready to "pull" emails and if I need to write emails. This has three distinct advantages:

• I do not get distracted with incoming emails
• Emails will send automatically as soon as I start to work online
• If I ever want to make changes to an email, I can open it up in my outbox

1. When possible, complete short tasks from my task list instead of opening the flood gates to email. This involves keeping a more detailed task list and better estimating the time to complete. Checking email is better than social media, but it may not be better than other tasks or taking a break (e.g., filling up coffee, drinking water, talking a quick walk, reading an article/book, etc.).
2. If I have a few minutes between meetings, or I'm in a meeting that doesn't require my full attention (there aren't many during the course of a week), checking emails is okay.
3. If I need to get into deep work, turn off Microsoft Teams. Our team has a great system for managing conversations and having transparency in the work we do. The downside is a lot of notifications coming from Microsoft Teams. My team knows if it's anything urgent, they can give me a call, but rarely is anything urgent enough that it can't wait an hour or two.
4. Tweak my daily survey question from "how many times did I check my email?" to "are you proud of how you managed your email today".

I'm feeling invigorated for 2021. If I run 12 sets of experiments this year, each a month long, collecting data for at least four weeks, reflecting on the results, and adjusting for the upcoming month, I should have a pretty solid system in place by the end of the year.

Thanks for reading! (I know your time is a valuable resource),

Robert

p.s. Energy management is something I want to dig deeper into this year. If anyone has any recommended books or articles on the topic, I'd be interested in hearing from you. And of course, I'm happy to hear and discuss more about email, calendar, and task management practices!