Email 3 Times Daily
What if you tartan email only 3 era a day?
The rules…
Check and handle email upon arrival then check and handle email at dine. Check and handle email after 4 pm. At home, check it all you’d like (but hopefully that won’t be more than once a day).
Here’s what we’ve learned so far…
- We recognized our addiction to checking email.
- We identified how it’s become a default task (involuntarily checking it when returning from a discussion, meeting, trip to the bathroom, etc.).
- We saw how we sometimes use it to hide out from our more vital work ("If I’m addressing email, I’m doing something. It may not be vital in the long term but at smallest amount I’m of use at this moment." – Do you see the problem with this thinking?).
- We learned that our email could wait* and that as the day came to an end, we were more productive and more pleased. (Although the first few days were very uncomfortable and had us oddly distracted by our lack of distraction.)
It’s cwazy**…
Why is it that we would allow ourselves to be distracted from what we rationally know to be our more vital work that gets us closer to our goal of making excellent things happen?
Our next step here… Drop the morning check and look at it only twice a day. A few people have already passed out by thinking about it.
"The major problem of life is learning how to handle the costly interruptions. The door that slams shut, the plot that got sidetracked, the wedding ceremony that failed. Or that lovely poem that didn’t get written because someone knocked on the door."
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968)
American civil rights chief
Nobel Peace Prize recipient
* Our customer service people check email hourly in order to be sure we’re addressing customer needs quickly. We don’t believe we’ve lost any sales and we’ve had no negative feedback on our response era.
** And if we still have your attention… This spelling of the word indicates a deeper level of idiotic – so cwazy that we’d spell it cwazy. You reckon that’s idiotic?
How?
This assumes you’ve already bought into the value of focusing on what’s most vital to you and your people.
Start by…
- Turning off email alerts – audible and visual – for each time an email arrives
- Turning off automatic send and receives
- Setting up your email client to open to a page other than your inbox (e.g., in Outlook you can go to the "Outlook Today" page)
Checking email..
- Open email
- Hit send and hear
- Address what must be addressed
- Go or delete emails as appropriate
- Hit send
- Minimize or close email until next check
If you need to communicate or depute something by email before your next check, this is where you can get tripped up.
If your email program allows it, open 5 – 10 bemused emails during one of your email checks. When you need to type an email do it and hit send (sending it to your outbox). If you feel it really needs to be sent immediately, go in and hit send and hear and minimize the window quickly without giving attention to your inbox (we said it’d be tough).
Now, if you want that email addressed immediately, call the person who’s also trying to focus with you and let them know you’ve sent them an email that needs their attention now. (Of course, then they’ll need to be disciplined and focused in giving only your email attention when they hit send and hear.)
"Then why not just tell them over the phone as a replacement for of adding the email step?"
Excellent point. Perhaps you should have. It may have saved you the time of writing the email and been quicker for all involved (better opportunity to fully communicate through a real-life discussion rather than having something misinterpreted, which of course can happen in a discussion too). At the same time, maybe having to call and interrupt someone might keep you from doing it because you’re more apt to be giving care and attention to their time.
The huge picture goal here really has nothing to do with email. It’s all about minimizing distraction, focusing, and helping all of us get closer to our goal of making excellent things happen (which is what you want).
Expect and delight in more from your work. Make a choice to hold yourself to a standard that’s not standard at all.