Tuesday Time-Wasting Tip-Off #1: Warning: Email Alerts Are Costing Your Company Money
Welcome to the first Tuesday Time-Wasting Tip-off, this week, the distraction of just one aspect of email.
Disable Your Email Alerts
A huge time sink. We all love email. Some days it just seems I live in the Inbox of Microsoft Outlook where I have to respond to a few dozen business emails and be in constant contact with a geographically dispersed group of people. Email can be an insidious productivity killer as it leads us to believe we are making industrious use of our time when we answer 20, 30, 50 or even 100 emails in a day. Much has been written about being more productive with your email or stopping it from becoming a huge time sink. I do not want to belabour the valid points that others have raise but there are some things you can do which might not be so obvious to prevent email from becoming a complete distraction.
Turn off your email received alert right now, by default Microsoft Outloook, the email package I use and the package of choice for most businesses, will announce you have new mail as soon as it arrives. Microsoft killed off the Office Assistant Clippy and all the other little avatars in Microsoft Office because they presented a huge distraction to users and were not particularly helpful to boot. The new mail alert needs to go the way of those dodos too.
If you spend your days hovering over every missive that is dispatched to you and feel the need to read or answer it the moment that it arrives, you should seek serious help in your time management skills. Until the day arrives that Microsoft disables this feature by default, I strongly suggest you turn off your email received alert in Outlook or any other email application you utilise. You do not need widgets on your desktop or cell phone either that alert you to new email. Unless you work in a rapid response, customer service department that depends on email as one of the communications channels you just do not need to be that distracted. Oh, and if you are responsible for monitoring the World of Warcraft servers and rebooting them when they need it and receive email alerts to that fact, you should ignore this advice. Just saying…
Email alerts are the near ultimate Pavlov experience topped only by an eBay outbid signal or Amazon Goldbox notice for their potential to distract. Alerts of just about any kind are a ridiculously flawed user interface practice and the final word in disruptive software[1]. One moment you are having a deep thought, utterly subsumed in your task, and then along comes your email client to announce you have new messages that demand an answer right now. Even worse, those little pieces of badly written communication are often not even relevant to your current task.
If you are a knowledge worker, such as an artist or programmer, and you work for someone who insists that you continuously monitor your email for their latest, deeply fascinating communiqué and respond within minutes, your best option is to talk to them.
Sit down for a one-on-one chat with the person about how your job requires large uninterrupted blocks of time for concentrating on your assigned tasks. Inform the person politely but firmly that checking email too often absolutely kills your productivity, preventing you from focusing on the work that you need to do.
Many jobs we do throughout the day require large blocks of time to concentrate and not everyone needs to be at the beck and call of someone every minute of the day. Should the person you are confronting about the email issue insist that you be constantly available whilst trying to do your most creative work requiring concentration, I suggest you start contemplating a new job. The person making demands of you to check your email frequently respects neither your time nor the work you produce, no matter how much they may protest to the contrary. Do you really want to work for someone like that?
I check my email at most twice a day, and that is still once more than necessary for my job. It has to be a very rare day when I am checking more often than that. I check my email as the first thing I do when I get in to the office, and I check it again towards the end of my waking day, just in case there is a communication that requires a response be sent before the next morning. Only checking two times a day allows me to get large blocks of concentrated time to work on projects for my company. My day is already filled with distraction and disruption so minimising and streamlining where I can, in this case, my email handling procedure, can really add up over the course of a month to save me hours I can use working on other projects.
By informing and educating people I work with that I only check my email twice a day it sets an expectation that they will not receive an immediate response from me. I find that generally one of two things happen, either the person refrains from contacting me for completely trivial issues or they personally interrupt me in a face-to-face communication. This latter problem is a topic for a different article.
Turn off email alerts, educate the people around you, check your email only twice a day, recover time to focus on what is important.
[1] And not disruptive in a good way either.