Take a Break from E-mails!
Ping! Ping! Ping!
That’s the sound of your inbox filling up with e-mails. No sooner have you opened one up and started reading it, a little pop up window appears to tell you another of its friends has arrived and seeks your attention.
You skim through the mail trying to make sense of it when, “Ping!”, another e-mail has arrived. This seems daunting and never ending. After all, in a digital world we are supposed to get e-mails, we are supposed to read them and we are expected to respond to them faster than they come in.
Trouble is, with all these e-mails coming in and hogging our time, we don’t really have time to work. It has come to the point that people have even forgotten what real work looks like and they believe that reading and responding to e-mails is work.
We get a dose of endorphins each time the mailbox tells us we have another e-mail. We feel we are needed and that we are important. Therefore, we happily open up the e-mails and spend our day peering at the computer or our phones.
The reality is that most e-mails are not that important. (Yes, I said that.) Most are just stuff you’ve been copied into which you just need to mark as read. There are the odd spam mails that have somehow snuck in through your e-mail filter. So why are you spending so much time on them.
The reason is that we have been conditioned to respond this way. It is a habit that developed with the introduction of a new technology. Unfortunately our social responses were not developed in line with developing technology. Hence, e-mail became work and work became,…..ignored.
So what do you need to do? You need to take a break from your e-mails. Don’t worry, they’re not going anywhere. They’ll be there when you get back. Believe me most of them are going to junk and to file and forget folders anyway. The few important ones left can be perused and replied to at leisure. However, you need to schedule when you are going to read and respond to e-mails and when you are going to roll up your sleeves and get to work.
A little discipline on your side will go a long way in making you more productive at work.