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In the knowledge economy, email is one of the largest distractions we face every day—it’s usually the largest pain point for people (with meetings being a close second). One of the best strategies to tame email is to limit how many email notifications you receive, which limits how frequently you’re interrupted. Sixty-four percent of people use notifications with either audible or visual signals to alert them to new messages—if you fall into this category, you’re probably spending too much time and attention on email.
In addition to limiting new message alerts, here are ten email tactics to stay focused and avoid distractions. These will help you check your email more deliberately, and constrain how much time and attention you spend on it in the first place.
“An addiction to distraction is the end of your creative production.” ~ Robin Sharma
1. Notification Check
Check for new messages only if you have the time, attention, and energy to deal with whatever might have come in. This is a simple trigger that lets you make sure you can actually deal with new messages, instead of getting stressed by the new stuff to which you have to respond.
2. Keep a Tally
Keep a tally of how often you check for messages. The average knowledge worker checks his email eleven times per hour—eighty-eight times over the span of a day. It’s hard to get any real work done with so many interruptions. The same study found that employees spend an average of just around thirty-five minutes on email per day—which means that email consumes much more attention than it does actual time. Once you become aware of how often you check for new messages, you’ll likely want to reduce that amount of time because of the high cost of interruptions.
3. Predecide When to Check
It’s not possible to avoid checking emails, so predecide when you’ll check. Determining ahead of time when you’ll check for new messages works wonders for reducing the number of times you open your email. Seventy percent of emails are opened within the first six seconds of receipt, so shutting off notifications will help you work in a less agitated and reflexive way.
4. Hyperfocus on Email
If you work in an environment that demands that you be highly responsive to emails, try hyperfocusing while answering your messages. Set a timer for twenty minutes, and in that time, blow through as many emails as you possibly can. Even if you receive an extraordinary number of messages, hyperfocusing on your inbox for twenty minutes, even as often as at the top of each hour, will enable you to get back to people quickly and allow you to still accomplish meaningful work the rest of the time. Plus, at most, the senders will have to wait only forty to sixty minutes for a response.
5. Limit Points of Contact
To avoid distraction, you should limit points of contact. It takes only ten seconds to carry out one of the most important productivity tactics: deleting the email app on your phone. You can have an email app only on your office device like a laptop or computer.
6. External To-Do List
Keeping an external to-do list is a nice tool to avoid distractions in the workplace. Your email application is the worst possible place to keep a to-do list—it’s distracting and overwhelming, and new stuff is constantly popping up, which makes it difficult to prioritize tasks and tell what’s truly important. A task list—where you simply keep a tally of what you have to get done today, preferably with your three daily intentions at the top—is simpler and much more powerful. While it takes an extra step to move your actionable emails to a separate list, doing so will leave you feeling much less overwhelmed and will enable you to better organize what’s on your plate.
7. Two Email Accounts
You should have two email addresses: the first one for public-facing and the second one for private. You can check the public-facing account once a day, and the other inbox a few times throughout the day. Nowadays, for many social sites or other online work, you get the option of signing up by email. For this, you can use your public email address. But, if you are having only a single email address, then all the notifications for those sign-ups will start floating in your inbox. And after some time your inbox will look like a junk box and the chances of missing important mail increase.
8. Email Holiday
Take an “email holiday.” If you’re hunkering down on a big project, set up an autoresponder explaining that you’re on a one- or two-day “email holiday” and that you’re still in the office and can be reached by phone or in person for urgent requests. People are far more understanding of this strategy than you may think.
You can use a similar strategy when you are on leave, by setting up an auto-reply to emails. In auto-reply, you can provide the contact details of the person managing your work in that period. This will help to close the majority of workplace cases by the time you resume office.
9. Five-Sentence Rule
Use the five-sentence rule. I personally like this strategy. In order to save your time and respect your email recipient’s time, keep each message you write to five sentences or less, and add a note to your email signature explaining that you’re doing so. If you feel the urge to write anything longer, use that as an opportunity to pick up the phone. This may save you from engaging in an unnecessarily protracted email exchange.
10. Wait Before Sending
If you are planning to send an important message, then make a draft of it and wait. Not every email is worth sending immediately—this is particularly true when you find yourself in an emotionally charged state when drafting a reply. While opening the draft again, you may find to delete some of the content, which you feel now is not worth mentioning. Also, during this waiting period, your subconscious mind may give some great ideas or thoughts which might be very effective for the draft email.
Some responses, you might ultimately decide, aren’t worth sending at all. For important messages, heated exchanges, or emails that require more thought, give yourself time to respond—and let your mind wander to allow new, better, and more creative ideas to rise to the surface.
Way Ahead
However we deal with it, email remains one of the most stressful elements of our work. One study that had participants go without email observed that after a period of just one week, their heart-rate variability changed as they became significantly less stressed. The subjects interacted more often with people, spent longer working on tasks, multitasked less, and became much more focused. The absence of email allowed people to work slowly and more deliberately. When the experiment ended, participants described the experience as liberating, peaceful, and refreshing. While it would be impossible to get rid of email completely, try the tactics above and experiment with what works best for you. (Inspired from “Hyperfocus: How to Work Less to Achieve More” by Chris Bailey).
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