2. Silence the noise – Turn of task reminders
Now that you have your task view set up to start your day you do not need to be reminded that all these tasks exist – especially because you have all your action items right in front of you now with your default view!
Task reminders create unnecessary distractions and pull us away from our focus.
3. Kill the ping – Turn off email notifications
This is the most important one! But you need to action the other two items before moving onto this one.
We get a positive dopamine hit every time we hear the “new email ping” or see the little letter pop up in the corner of our screens.
When you hear a ping or see a message pop up, your brain automatically reacts, you even get a physical response in your body and there is the absolute need to check that email. The more we respond, the more our body wants the dopamine rush of responding. So this habit is a hard one to break .
We also know that multitasking does not work – as soon as you get a notification your train of thought is broken and lots of us jump straight to the inbox.
You do not need to get notified on every email that you receive.
You do not need to cause your nervous system stress by responding to every enquiry and every person’s requests.
If it is urgent, they will call you or actually come over to your desk.
This goes for email that you get on your phone too – you do not need to be notified that you have an email and you do not need to respond to it straight away.
Just because someone has emailed us does not mean that we are obligated to respond to it immediately.
Turn off those notifications and give your brain the chance to focus.
4. Don’t check everything all the time – Create digital boundaries
So while you may have turned off your email notifications, you also need to break the habit of simply checking the inbox at all times of the day. Breaking concentration just to see if anyone has emailed you is not the way to be productive.
My recommendation is to only check email at set times of the day.
I do 9am and 8pm but I am much less tied to email in my job than others. I also work different hours to most traditional office roles.
What worked for me when I worked in a typical “9 – 5” job was to check emails:
- First thing when you come in, say 8.30 or 9am, and go through all new emails. This is where we do the 1 touch approach
- Delete
- Delegate
- Do
- Schedule to do another time – need actioning but don’t need to be done right away schedule as a task – this will be covered in my next point
- Other times of 11am, 2pm, 4pm
Do not check work emails outside of work hours.
I can not stress this enough. You deserve to rest and have time to yourself and to recharge, and to spend time on things that light you up, not emails.
Here in Australia we also have “right to disconnect” legislation – where you are allowed to refuse to monitor, read or respond to work-related contact outside of your normal working hours.
It is also important to be careful of the precedent that you set for your team around this. I used to work alongside a team lead that checked his emails at 9pm because it helped him set up for a good day the next day. This worked for him but it meant his team felt obligated to do the same, which caused some anxiety with the team.
Make sure you set boundaries for your team if necessary, and just because it is what works for you does not mean it is what works for everyone.
This also goes for phone usage – the advice given to me from Joe was “treat your work mobile as a landline – if you are out of the office you are unable to answer.”
5. Get your emails working for you – Turn emails into tasks
I mentioned in the section earlier about the 1 touch approach to emails – one of these being schedule to another time.
This is for emails that have some action required, but the action will take some time or can’t be done right away. Use the email to create a task, and add a due date. This will automatically add that to your tasks list, with a copy of the email in the task as well.
This gives you a clear framework for when you need to get that item taken care of, and allows you to easily get to that item when you are ready to complete it.
6. Establish a gatekeeper – Create rules that work
Creating rules for your emails is a great way to keep track of them as well as making sure that you are creating structure for your day.
Some really good rules to create are:
- Add any email where you are just a CC to a designated folder
- These are often lower priority, and you could review this folder once a day to keep on top of these ones
- All newsletters to a specific folder
- So you can batch read these at another time
- Emails about personal growth to a specific folder
- I always encourage anyone to spend 30 – 60 minutes a week on personal growth and development. This might include reading a newsletter or particular email to improve your knowledge in a certain area. I like Fridays for this time slot, but you do what works for you.
- And of course unsubscribe when the content no longer works for you!
Final points to remember:
- Your inbox is not your default to-do list
- Read items once and then do something with them – respond, delete, delegate to someone else or schedule for later
- You are not obligated to respond to an email as soon as you receive it
- Create custom folders to store your emails as your read them
- Convert your emails into tasks to help with time management
