The email quandary

I have read many bloggers talking about email lately.  Zen Habits discussed the elimination of email all together and has since reduced his email usage quite significantly, but not all together. Productivity 501 shares best practices for email usage. Today, I received an email (!!) from the Thin Pink Line discussing this very same addiction, as they referred to it.

There are some tried and true email rules that are frequently shared in some of these blogger’s posts. Or in articles or magazines. Some of them are: don’t check email when you first get up or get into the office.  Only check email once in the morning and once in the afternoon.  Turn off the new email chime as well as the little envelope that appears in your lower right status bar so that you are not a slave to new mail arriving.

It is interesting that you notice those things that you are actually wondering about within yourself.  I noticed one day in the recent past that I was basically in my work email all day long. I was constantly refreshing and just basically being less than productive because I was allowing myself to become a slave to the emails that I thought might come in, or actually did.  I noticed I did this for most of the day up through dinner. As I was sitting and having dinner, I thought about what I needed to do the next day and realized that I had wasted the day being less than productive on other work I wanted to accomplish. All because I either checked my email constantly or worked from my email all day long.

This is highly inefficient and definitely not the best use of my time.  The following weekend, I promptly turned off my computer and turned off my cell phone. I enjoyed a weekend filled with time, meeting up with friends and luxuriously enjoying their company, and being outside without a care in the world.  I felt like I was on vacation.  My brain didn’t feel taxed and I didn’t feel twitchy because my email was dinging away at me.  It was by far the least technically attached I have been in a while. I highly recommend it.  Maybe you don’t turn off your cell like I did if that is your only telephonic source, but instead you turn off the beeps or vibrations of your email and text.  All I can say is, it was a relief to not be so connected.  Have you changed your email habits lately?