Kill Your E-mail Notifier
Even only as an experiment, try killing your e-mail notifier and turn off automatic mail checking on your phone.
Two things will most likely happen:
1) You will catch yourself reaching to check your mail far more than you expect, resulting in an uncomfortable feeling that you’re addicted. Ignore it! It will pass.
2) You’ll also realise that you’ve just worked for more than an hour on something without being interrupted. How did that feel?
Lots of other things could happen too; you might feel more relaxed, you might notice people are interrupting you less because they simply can’t get hold of you, and they’re getting used to it!
In the majority of work there are few emergencies yet we allow ourselves to be on call every day. This is a relatively new thing (think back even just 5 years) and each e-mail is robbing us of our focus.
Remember it may only take 15 seconds to deal with an unimportant e-mail but each time one comes in your focus is derailed. Check your e-mail once every 2 hours though and you’ll burn through them at 15 seconds each without sacrificing focus.
If you don’t believe me, try it! It’s the only way to be sure. And if you catch yourself saying, “that’s all very well for you, but that simply wouldn’t work in my line of work”, ask yourself honestly if that is true. Given that we regularly deceive ourselves however, I’d recommend just trying it for a week.
What’s the worst that can happen?
