Taking Back Control of Your Inbox

Hi, I’m David and my mission in life is to prepare people for the future of work.?

In this week’s edition of the newsletter the theme revolves around the habits you have developed concerning your email inbox. Our relationship with email is complicated. On the one hand, one can ask himself/herself, how many meetings could have been emails? On the other hand, one can also ask, how many emails could have been spared by a call? Therefore, like with any technology, email is as useful and conducive to productive work or as distracting and energy draining as each of us makes it. However, one thing that’s for certain is that?being reachable around the clock means living at the mercy of other people’s calendars. It’s a recipe for burnout. And it prizes shallow reactions over deep reflection or, in other words, we wind up rushing to get things done instead of doing them as best as we can.?The true test of ‘email mastery’ isn’t the speed of reply, but the quality of the reply itself. Below are some insights and thoughts that will help you take back control of your inbox and as a result, make space for focused work and for being more present with your loved ones.

Timeless Insight

“The single most important change you can make in your working habits is to switch to creative work first, reactive work second. This means blocking off a large chunk of time every day for creative work on your own priorities, with the phone and email off.” – Mark McGuinness

The first step that someone should take in order to enhance his/her productivity is to figure out at what time of the day he/she is at peak performance (i.e. when his/her levels of energy and focus are at their highest point). For some people, it’s the early hours of the morning (‘early birds’), for others it’s late at night (‘night owls’). Regardless of when during the course of a day you are at peak performance, you must guard that time interval for dear life, as in many cases the difference between achieving your goals and not is made during those few hours in which you are at your best. In my case I work best, especially for creative tasks such as writing this newsletter or cognitive-intensive ones such as solving a complex problem, in the early hours of the day. So, what do I do with this insight? I schedule creative tasks for the morning and everything else (e.g. calls, responding to emails (unless they're urgent), etc.) for the afternoon. That’s how I do my best writing. That’s how I make the best decisions. If I don’t get distracted at the beginning of the day when my mind is fresh and I am at my best, then I am able to pursue my own agenda rather than reacting to everybody else’s. For more information about how you can make your daily routine work for you, not against you, I recommend reading Mark McGuinness’ book Manage Your Day-to-Day .?

Food for Thought

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to my habits over the years and how each of them affects me both mentally and emotionally (i.e. what drains my energy and what gives me energy). Based on the insights I gathered, I learned to develop healthy habits and to drop bad ones.?However, one habit that I often need to revisit, given how tricky it is to get it right, is email.?

Our relationship with email is complicated. While I believe it’s one of the best tools to enhance productivity, if used sparingly, I also consider it to be one of our biggest distractions. We check email first thing in the morning. We check email on the bus on our way to work. We even check email during a conversation or a call, with the belief that no one will notice.

For most of human history, only a few professions (e.g. doctors, plumbers perhaps, emergency service technicians, etc.) required this kind of state of being constantly on call. Now, almost all of us live this way, mainly because of how pervasive email has become. Every email must be attended to, or so we falsely believe, until we get our inbox to zero.

Chances are that our feeling of satisfaction and relief, which having a clear inbox can elicit, will be short-lived, because as we hit send to what we believe to be the last email of the day, another one comes in, and then another, and another, and we can go on like this for ages. Our working lives (and sometimes even our personal ones) are now revolving around email.

For our parents and grandparents being responsive meant paying attention to the needs of a small group of people in their immediate vicinity (e.g. family, friends, neighbours, peers, etc.). Now, there’s no limit to the number of people who can reach out to us by email or by text, and given how interconnected the world is nowadays, they can technically reach out to us 24/7.?

The digital overload we’re all experiencing to some degree requires us to re-examine our relationship with email and to come to terms with the fact that if we’re responsive to everyone all the time, we will eventually get burned out (see here the 5 stages of burnout). And while being praised for our promptitude feels good, our mental health should come first.

Some organisations and individuals are taking action to take back control of their inboxes. For example, a Dutch financial services company asked its employees to, instead of replying continuously to emails, block out two or three periods a day to respond to them in batches. This simple ‘batching emails’ system reduced employee burnout and increased productivity.?

John Freeman argues in The Tyranny of Email that the average office worker “sends and receives more than 100 emails a day.” He adds, “If the research on multitasking is any guide, and if several centuries of liberal arts education have proven anything, the ability to think clearly and critically and develop an argument comes from reading in a focused manner.”

This constant back and forth between working on a task and checking your inbox to keep up with the never-ending onslaught of emails you receive on a daily basis is hurting not only your ability to accomplish a task, but also your ability to focus. Therefore, it’s high time to take back control of the mental space email is consuming. Here are three tips you can use:?

1. Don’t send that email - The most important thing you can do to decrease the number of emails in your inbox, free up your attention span, and break free of the tyranny of email is not to send another email. Email only creates more email, so instead of launching into an email exchange with someone, try giving him/her a phone call.

2. Don’t check it first thing in the morning - If you check your email first thing when you wake up, you will probably start your day by worrying about work matters before you actually get there. This doesn’t just impact you, but those around you as well (e.g. spouse, children), because when you’re stressed you are less present with them.?

3. Check your email only at certain times - You can also apply the approach the employees of the Dutch financial services company used (see example above), which is to block out two or three periods a day to respond to emails in batches. This will enable you to get things done even in a climate of constant communication.?

Article of the Week?

Your Email Does Not Constitute My Emergency

Caricature of the Week

Thank you for reading and keep on growing!

David

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