Weaning Off Email
August 28, 2007 by Greg
Last Monday, in the waning hours of twilight, I decided to re-organize my life and put all my personal and professional projects in order. Years ago I had read Getting Things Done, and it revolutionized my efficiency. However, a few years later, I’ve let a lot of things slip. Hence my midnight refresher course. One of the new behaviors I’m adopting is an email schedule.
I’m one of those people who keeps my email open all day long, constantly feeding of the somewhat irregular onslaught of communication. I know I could do a lot better things with my time than this, but the ingrained behavior is so temporarily fulfilling, it’s hard to wean myself off. So I’ve created a strict schedule and created a replacement behavior.
Anytime I get the desire to check my email, I use it as a cue to focus briefly on something else. When I feel like checking my email, it usually means I’ve lost focus on my current project. Instead, I now use that small break to knock off one quick item on my todo list. I’m actually writing this post because I almost pulled up my gmail window to see whether or not my apartment is reserved in Argentina or if my friends want to go see that Dalai Lama this weekend.
The information can wait till my next email check at 1pm, but this post definitely needed to get done.
How frequently are you checking your email?
Every phreaking second of every day it would seem. This is a great idea and something Ferris talks about in 4HWW as a huge effectiveness improver.
I’ve got three email addies:
1) Personal. Very very low volume. I’ve removed myself from various lists, updates, so on and so forth, reducing my 20-messages-a-day to almost zero. I keep it open (gmail in browser), but rarely look at it.
2) Work - Corporate. I work in a subdivision of a larger corp. My “corporate” email account gets 5-10 a day, and maybe 0.2 a day applies to me. I check this once a day, delete button at the ready.
3) Work - Division. I have two email boxes to check, my personal and the “customer” inbox. I check the former once at the beginning of the day, and once an hour before I leave. The latter I check once every couple hours. Our Service Level Agreements state we have a 24-hour turnaround on email, but not all of our customers follow/realize this. I would follow Tim’s advice and check twice a day, but it’s easier for me to check the inbox than it is to escalate something as unauthorized to a customer (involving numerous phonecalls at 3am ;)).
4HWW has really opened my eyes to the various timewasters, including the shite email I got. No, it didn’t take a lot of time to deal with individually, but cumulatively it was a lot. Unsubscribe from things I didn’t want (including contacting my banks/credit cards/ebay/paypal to remove me from “special offers” lists, etc) and other things like creating auto-archive filters for netflix, etc.).
I have 2 “spam” accounts too, for sites I don’t care at ALL about getting stuff from, myspace/facebook/etc… I “check” those once every two weeks to keep them from being deleted due to inactivity :).
p.s. My replies are massive and awesome. Why am I not a contributer yet? Haha!
Hrmmmm… I check constantly. My corporate Outlook and personal gmail are open every second I’m on my computer which is all day at work and usually a couple hours at home after work. Also I have a Treo 750 which checks both accounts. The first thing I do when I get up is look at the phone for new mail and its the last thing I do before going to sleep. Addicted…definitely.
I often get upwards of 100 personal emails a day on gmail and work is usually 40-50 a day. My gmail is very clean from any spam or mailing lists so those are all actual friends. A lot of that comes from a group that just hits reply-to-all all day long… might as well be a chat room really.
I just remembered I also have to use my client’s email system which is completely separate, thats another 40-50 messages a day.
It is all very distracting. I changed the settings on my client computer so it only downloads mail when I prompt it otherwise I get interrupted every couple minutes and go on a sidetrack.
The Treo lets me be on my laptop less though because I can glance at the home screen and tell if I have any new work related messages.