The No Email Hour

When you are overwhelmed, it is all too easy to focus on busywork like reading and answering emails instead of the tasks that really matter.  You probably have your email program open all day long, and you may even have pop-ups or audible notifications set up to alert you when a new message comes in.  Email can contain important information, but it is likely the single biggest distraction of your workday! 

You may think you can check or compose emails while you are doing other things throughout the day, but Gary Keller says in his popular book, The One Thing, "Multi-tasking is a lie."  What he means is that we cannot truly do more than one thing at a time.  Productivity psychologist,  Dr. Melissa Gratias explains it well, "Our brain does not perform tasks simultaneously. It performs them in sequence, one after another.  So, when we are multitasking we are switching back and forth between the things we are doing."  The price we pay for attempting to multi-task is called switching cost.

"Switching cost is the disruption in performance that we experience when we switch our attention from one task to another," explains James Clear, author of the New York Times bestseller, Atomic Habits.   Just think of how many times a day you check your email!  A study published in the International Journal of Information Management in 2003 reports that a typical employee checks email nearly every 5 minutes and it takes over a minute to get back to what they were doing before the email interruption.  Do the math - that's a waste of 10 minutes every hour which equates to an hour and 20 minutes out of an eight hour workday just getting our brains reset back to what we were concentrating on before we stopped to check email.

To combat this distraction, start by choosing one hour of your workday to NOT check email.  Trust me, I know this is hard!  I picked a hour in the morning because that allows me to get important tasks done without distraction early in the day.   Select an hour in the portion of your day where you feel the sharpest and most awake so that you can leverage that energy and get meaningful work done when you are at your best.   It would would be a shame to waste the best part of your day on your inbox!

To really make this hour productive, make sure you have a task list in order of priority handy so that you can jump right in doing the thing that matters the most.  Next week's post will be about how to do first things first (I'm pretty excited about this one!)

If you get really good at a "no email hour" in your workday, you may want to try increasing that time.  Depending on the type of work you do, it may be detrimental to be 'off the grid' for too long.  Some experts suggest only checking email a couple of times a day, but in my day job, that would just not be acceptable.  If I do need to be away from email longer than an hour or so, I sometimes set a temporary automated out of office message to set the expectation that my response will be delayed.  The message can be very simple like, "I'm working on a high priority project and will not be checking email until 2 p.m.  If you have an urgent need, please text me at ###-###-####."

One caveat that makes the "no email hour" tricky is that many tasks may require sending emails, so be careful not to get sucked in to your inbox when composing a new message.  To avoid the temptation, try these shortcuts to open just a blank message instead of your entire inbox. 

Outlook - When you want to send a message, simply right click on the Outlook icon on your taskbar, and choose new message.  You could also create a desktop shortcut to compose a new message (instructions here.)

Gmail - There is a handy dandy Chrome Extension called Quick Compose for Gmail that allows you to open up a blank message withOUT going to your inbox.  Once you've installed the extension, there's even a keyboard shortcut!

iPhone Mail App - Use 3D or haptic touch (which basically means that you tap and hold) on the mail icon until a menu appears, and then select new message.  This brings up a blank message without taking you into your inbox.  NOTE: if you have multiple email accounts set up on your phone, the message will be automatically from your default account, but you can easily change that by tapping on the from address and choosing the proper account.

These are the three mail apps I use most often, but if you use others, I'm sure a quick Google search of "how to compose a message without opening my (insert mail app) inbox" will bring up tips to help you.

Try the "no email hour" for a week and let me know how amazing it feels to get an entire hour's worth of work down without email interruptions!  

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​Sources
Clear, James. ATOMIC HABITS: an Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones. RANDOM House BUSINESS, 2019.

Clear, James. “The Myth of Multitasking: Why Fewer Priorities Leads to Better Work.” James Clear, 4 Feb. 2020, jamesclear.com/multitasking-myth.

Hoyt, Alia. “How Multitasking Works.” HowStuffWorks Science, HowStuffWorks, 27 Jan. 2020, science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human-brain/multitasking.html.

Jackson, T., Dawson, R. and Wilson, D., 2003. Reducing the effect of email interuption on employees. International Journal of Information Management, 23(1), pp.55-65

Keller, Gary. The One Thing: the Surprisingly Simple Truth behind Extraordinary Results. John Murray Press, 2019.

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash