Checking My Email Is a Waste of Time

I’m no pro­duc­tiv­ity guru. How­ever, a few months ago, I came to a dra­matic real­iza­tion:  check­ing my email can be a grand waste of time. I’m not sure why it took me so long to real­ize this. Thanks to a few help­ful com­ments in Four Hour Work­week, I was able to save scads of time sim­ply by check­ing my email less frequently.

Email itself not a waste of time. Rather, check­ing my email so fre­quently was becom­ing a time drain. “So what?” I would think to myself, “I’m just click­ing a tab on my browser, look­ing it over…No big deal.”

Actu­ally, it was a big deal. The lit­tle tab click thing was actu­ally cre­at­ing a mind shift as well. I was dis­tract­ing myself from my task, divert­ing my entire atten­tion to some­thing else, squan­der­ing away a few min­utes on need­less archiv­ing, then try­ing to revert my atten­tion back to the impor­tant task. With that hap­pen­ing so fre­quently through­out the day, pre­cious min­utes were being wasted.

So, I decided to deal with my email in chunks of time, at spe­cific points through­out the day. At 11a and 4p, I would go to my email and deal with it. Some­times, it takes me an hour to deal with it all. Some­times it takes me a few min­utes. All I know is that some­how, I am now able to do more, to focus more, and to get more stuff done.

Today, I read this sad state­ment by pro­duc­tiv­ity coach Jared Gorlanick:

Most peo­ple spend more time dur­ing the week on email than they do with their fam­i­lies. They also lose a quar­ter of those days to recov­er­ing from inter­rup­tions, pri­mar­ily due to email.

Of course, I don’t always stick to my reg­i­mented email times. I real­ize, how­ever, that email is a tool to help my work and com­mu­ni­ca­tion; it’s not the mas­ter of my day. Despite the addict­ing dopamine rush of new mes­sages, I have bet­ter things to do all day than keep click­ing that tab with the red envelope…that time monster.