One of the caveats of Focus Day is that it doesn't absolve us from our duties, and we may still need to step in and handle emergencies if that's our charge. Ultimately, you'll need to check your email at some point and possibly need action. That's just life. The question isn't really about whether you should do email. It is really about how you will deal with email to reduce its drag on your focus, productivity, and creativity.
1. Set a specific time to check email. Choose one or more blocks in the day where you'll deal with email. You probably do this daily anyway, but make these shorter than you usually do. Perhaps no more than 20-30 minutes. Avoid doing email first thing in your day if your role lets you. If you really are worried email will nag at you in the background while you're trying to work on something, then perhaps do it first thing. I prefer to leave it until after I've done my first Focus Day time block. This alone can be liberating. 2. It's time to check your email. Gird thyself. You need to mentally prepare yourself for incoming stuff that will make you want to react to it and potentially do it right away. Worse still, you don't do it, so it could create an open loop that drags on later in the day. Get yourself ready for this possibility to prepare yourself for the next step because it will take a bit of willpower to ignore—and ultimately forget—things that aren't urgent. 3. Read only new email subject lines Filter your inbox to show only new messages; read over the subject lines for stuff that seems specific and urgent. If it's not something that appears to need doing right now, then leave it unread for your next visit to your inbox. At this point, that should be all. However, you may find it hard to ignore things, you might not keep your "unread" flags up to date etc. so you'll be nagged by the feeling that you'll miss or forget something. If that's a problem, proceed to step 4. 4. Process your emails, but don't action everything (or even anything) The concept of processing email is explained best in David Allen's GTD method: capture, clarify, and then set some reminders to deal with any actions for the right place and time. Use the two-minute rule: if it takes two minutes or less to reply to or action an email, do it now. Otherwise: file anything that isn't actionable and organize anything requiring action. That means jotting down a reminder in a list or diary so that you do it in the right time and context. I keep three folders in my email client: Actions, Review, and Reply. The names are pretty self-explanatory: The Actions folder is for emails requiring that I do something, usually soon and has the steps needed to deal with it; Review is for stuff I should look at but don't have time to digest in detail right now. Often, these are journal tables of contents or newsletters. Reply is possibly redundant with Actions, but it does help me sort out messages that might require me to have a bit of time to think and compose a proper reply. A simple folder system like this can help you keep a clear head and not worry that you'll forget about something you saw. The key to any of this working is that you need a system that you trust. If your brain doesn't trust you to check in regularly with your diary or lists, you will continue to hold that information in memory, and you'll continue to worry about it. This generates stress and drags on your focus. The key to a trusted system is that it's something you're doing or dealing with pretty much every day or very regularly. This means that dealing with email in this way needs to be a daily or routine exercise and not something you do just on Focus Days. At an institutional and operational level, improving the focus, well-being, and experience, therefore, comes down to respecting the fact that none of us is at our best with an inbox that's constantly open in the background.
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Martin d brazeauPalaeontologist, fieldworker, sometimes phylogenetic programmer. Transplanted Canadian in UK. All views are my own. How to pronounce my name? Rhymes with "bureau" or "chateau". He/him/his. Archives
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