Best Way to Celebrate National Email Week?
“If you’re not pissing somebody off, you’re not doing your job.”
That’s what my project manager told me about consulting. When I talk to prospects and clients about productivity in the workplace and improving time management skills, the biggest piece of advice is the one they hate the most. When I say to them: turn off your email notifications.
Email notifications torpedo productivity in the workplace
One of the key drivers of productivity – not busy-ness but accomplishing the tasks that move you forward – is the ability to concentrate on one task. Can you concentrate when you’re continuously interrupted? It doesn’t matter whether or not you’re neurotypical, constantly being distracted breaks your focus.
Not only is your concentration broken in the moment that your email notification pops up, whether that’s a text on your screen, a vibration, or a chime. But it can take up to 23 minutes to get back to where you were on the task.
Another way to say this is: if you get two email notifications an hour, you may only get about 15 minutes of that hour to do your work.
And you wonder why you’re busy all the time and work such long hours. Out of your hour, you get 15 minutes of solid work. That’s how destructive your email notifications are to your productivity.
And if you’re a business owner, that’s how much email destroys the focus for your staff. Have six team members doing cognitively demanding work? That should give you 360 work minutes per hour (6*60 minutes in an hour.) But you’re only getting about 90 work minutes (6*15).
Batching tasks like email is a huge booster for time management
Human brains didn’t develop and adapt to surroundings that were fast-paced, technical, and involved in doing lots of different tasks. That work environment has been around for less than 50 years. The human brain doesn’t like to switch from task to task because it’s tiring.
So when you’re working on something, get distracted by an email, take care of the email, and then go back to the task, it fatigues your brain. It’s much more efficient and easier for your brain to handle a bunch of emails all at once.
Batching them during a time of low energy and effort for your brain is also a big booster for productivity in the workplace. Save your thinky work for the times your brain is best able to handle those tasks, and take care of email and admin the rest of the day.
But I have to answer emails right away!
This is what people tell me. And for most people, it’s not true. It really isn’t. We’ve all been trained – and yes, me too – to answer them right away. Are the emails you receive so urgent that someone will die or be seriously injured when you don’t answer right away?
Some of you might believe that your job is on the line if you don’t answer right away. That’s probably not true either. But, you may need to set expectations with your clients (and supervisors) that you will only be reading and responding to emails during certain times of the day.
Use an auto-responder email to let anyone who emails you know that you have received their email and will attend to it later.
You can also state the times of day that you look at emails on your auto-responder.
If you’re worried about your boss’s reaction, there are a couple of ways to handle it.
You could have most emails directed to a folder that you look at only during certain times of day, but let your boss's and other important people’s emails flow directly to your inbox. Note that though this will reduce email interruptions, it doesn’t eliminate them. So you will not be as productive as you could be.
You could request to turn off notifications just during your thinky work time, when you’re focusing on important and cognitively demanding work that requires your focus.
For example, if you’re a bear chronotype, your best time for focus work is 8 or 9 in the morning to 12 or 1 in the afternoon. Your boss might allow you to turn off notifications during this time so you can concentrate if they won’t allow you to turn them all the way off.
The bottom line is that the more email notifications you allow, the less productive you are. Granted, I personally am on the extreme end of productivity and haven’t had email notifications enabled for about 20 years. I didn’t win any prizes for being most helpful, to be fair. It’s a tradeoff. But you can’t complain about having limited productivity in the workplace when you have email notifications enabled all day.
Still not sure about time management and email notifications?
Many people cling to the idea that they need to answer emails right away, especially since sometimes it’s almost regarded as a badge of honor – just like busy-ness. But if you still think that you have a lot of important emails that need to be answered right away, test your theory. Call it the National Email Week challenge.
Categorize all your emails for a few days this week into the following buckets:
Action items to be handled ASAP – meaning they couldn’t wait even one hour to be dealt with. If you didn’t respond to this email immediately, then it doesn’t go into this bucket.
Emails from VIPs in your organization – C suite, plus immediate supervisors/managers
People trying to schedule something with you, whether friends, colleagues, vendors, or whoever
Notifications from online groups, whether “social” media or something else
Newsletters that you read regularly
Newsletters you don’t read
Ads, people you don’t remember, things you signed up for
Other
At the end of the week, tally up how many you have in each bucket.
The ONLY emails that you need notifications for are the ones in the first action bucket. If you have zero, then you don’t need email notifications at all. It doesn’t mean you’re not important, but probably people communicate urgent and important things in other ways besides email to you. Which means you don’t need email notifications on.
Remember, turning off email notifications doesn’t mean that you never read or attend to your emails. It means that you take care of them all at once at a time you yourself choose instead of allowing them to break your concentration.
Look at the other buckets and consider whether they need to interrupt your focus work. Online notifications that you won’t check for hours anyway? Newsletters you once subscribed to that you no longer even read? (Unsubscribe from them.) There may be some that you do read, but do you need to break your concentration for them when you’re probably not going to read them for a little while anyway?
People trying to sell you things you don’t need? People trying to schedule things probably don’t need an immediate response, plus you should just have them put themselves on your calendar with a link. The VIPs probably don’t need to be read immediately either (if they didn’t fall into your action bucket), but you may need to explain why you’re batching before you start doing it.
Recap (tl;dr):
Although many businesspeople believe that emails must be read immediately, that’s not true for the most part. There are ways to handle emails so they don’t interrupt your flow and make your brain tired, which also increase productivity in the workplace.