Productivity Tuesday #1: Leave your email alone!
This is one of my attempts to make a themed post every week and I think productivity is still an interesting take. So here’s my take on tips to increase productivity. Some will be plain obvious, but I guess we (especially me) need reminders once in a while. For the first tip I’ll start really simple: Leave your email alone!
Here’s the 3 main reason why you should just leave your email alone and get back to work
1. It’s a major distraction
Unless your main job is replying emails, checking emails or getting email notification too often is a major distraction. Every single time you check your email, you literally stop working.
So step 1: when working, put all notification to silent.
2. Email doesn’t need immediacy
The thing that I love about email is that it is asynchronous, it doesn’t need both party to be available at the same time. In essence, it doesn’t need immediacy. You have the freedom to reply it whenever you want, so use it wisely. Besides, If it’s important then they’ll use a more disruptive method: Phone calls.
I usually limit checking my emails 3 times a day at max. Which is in the morning when I start working, after lunch and at the end of the day to check if I miss anything. Now I’m not the one to receive massive amount of emails everyday, maybe just about 10-20 important emails per day so it works.
Step 2: Limit your email checking.
3. It’s mostly spam anyway
I wish there’s a technology to detect which emails are important to me and which are not. Gmail actually did a decent job with priority inbox but after using it for about 3 months, I periodically miss a couple of important emails. I guess the algorithm isn’t perfect so I switch back to classic.
Most of our emails are spam, junk, mailing list and daily deals subscription anyway, no reason to jump right away to look.
Step 3: Relax, it’s probably spam
Conclusion
So to recap things, here’s the steps:
- Put all notifications to silent
- Limit your email checking to 3 times per day max
- Relax and don’t over-think it, it’s probably spam anyway.
If you’re applying these then let me know how it works in the comment sections. Would love to hear your feedback.
