Take back control from your emails in 3 simple steps

"Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution” - Aristotle

Hi there,

How is your week going? Are you conquering your to-do list, or are your emails demanding you move your time and focus elsewhere?

Well, if it’s the latter - you’re not alone.

A client recently shared that one of their biggest daily challenges was keeping across their emails. They expressed overwhelm due to an overflowing inbox and admitted that they had defaulted to using it as a ‘to-do’ list.

This created a significant concern for them. By letting their inbox determine their activities each day, they asked themselves, what strategic priorities am I neglecting?

What the data tells us:

Today, email distraction is one of the greatest threats to employee productivity and wellbeing

The distraction caused by email and similar programs inhibits productivity. Gloria Mark’s research reported that we get distracted by emails roughly every 3 minutes and when this happens it takes ~23 minutes to get back to the original task.

This not only risks our productivity but causes stress and a strong sense of overwhelm – two key drivers of burnout.

Outside of work, email can bring a sense of intensity and overwhelm into our homes. Notifications from work can arrive after hours (despite Right to disconnect laws creating legal work boundaries for employees), and the quick accessibility to our emails through smart phones means we have developed habits of checking-in, while our kids are in the bath, while we’re cooking dinner, or (please no!) when we’re in the middle of a conversation with our loved ones.

The fact is, email does an excellent job of distracting us from our current task, which is likely of higher priority.

A simple solution:

Email programs are a communication tool at their core. They are designed to notify you whenever new content arrives and filter the information according to their date, sender, or subject line, all of which are determined by the sender, not the recipient.

But for this to be effective, it is up to the user to determine how they would like to use the communication tool.

1. Set your boundaries.

There are two aspects to boundary setting:

• The first aspect is individual and requires self-reflection to understand what works for you. Take some time to ask yourself questions like, when do I like to do deep work? When do I observe myself begin to procrastinate or socialise? When I’m at home, what are the triggers that make me feel stressed about work? Are there any patterns to those triggers? These questions will give you a better understanding of when you need multiple hours of focus time, when emails would be a welcome interruption in your day, and how to manage the stress habits that work has created in your home environment.
• The second aspect is collective and requires team communication and collaboration, to understand how your preferences can work with others. At Simple Nimble, we review our availability weekly and discuss things like our home commitments, travel commitments, client bookings, and priorities. At the end of each weekly conversation (we call these our WIP), we understand and adjust our schedules and routines to meet the home and work priorities of each staff member.

2. Change your settings to reflect your boundaries

For email – this means turning notifications off and manually checking your emails only at scheduled times pre-defined during your boundary-setting session. Tim Ferriss knows this well, going even further with auto-responses that let people know when they can expect to hear from you.

?3. Prioritise your tasks, independent of your emails

Aim to have one source of truth, separate from your email, where you categorise your priorities and keep a track of everything. Try something new –?we use Odoo - but Teams, Medium, or a notebook are all effective methods for managing tasks that are driven by your priorities. It all depends on how you like to work, how your team interacts and what resonates with your brain.

The result

Less interruptions enable more focussed effort and control over your time.

Your next challenge will be deciding how you allocate that time. We recommend assigning a good chunk to the flow state to replace the dopamine hit you used to get from your email ping.

If you found this helpful, forward it to a friend or a colleague who's going email-mad. And subscribe to our newsletter, so you never miss an update.

Thank you for reading?<3

See you next time,

Amy + Kiri