Stop reading your emails and become more productive

I know I'm going to touch a popular and well debated subject, but today I want to talk about managing emails and improving productivity. In the last few months I often stumbled on blog posts about productivity, telling me to stop reading my emails if I wanted to get things done. In theory it seems sensible, but in real life, we all have team projects going on, deadlines to deal with, fires to attend to and so it seems unreasonable to shut down Outlook and expect to make progress without creating more backlog. Plus let's admit it, we're addicted to them, emails make us feel connected.



Photo from Nicolas_T

Well, that's what I thought, until I actually tried it for myself. A few months ago, I decided to give it a go and see how it would help me. So now I have removed all outlook notifications -sound and bouncing icon- and I have also set my iphone so that it doesn't bing when I get a new email. I keep outlook open so that I still get meeting reminders but I actually don't look at it until I have finished any task I am working on.

In parallel, I use time blocks to make sure I work on one project at a time, and dedicate enough time to it. I usually plan my blocks at the beginning of the week or first thing in the morning, so that even if I need to attend some meetings, I know I still have some time set aside to work on these important tasks I need to do. Time blocks can vary in length, from 15 minutes to an hour or more, but the beauty of them is that because you know it's only going to be a finite amount of time constrained on one particular task, you are less likely to divert into doing something else. You can also reward yourself with checking your emails or doing other mundane tasks once time is up.

So does it work for me? Absolutely. I read some advice from Zen Habits on how to organise my emails and process them in batch so that my inbox stays empty, and so far it's working well. As a result, I don't feel stressed that I have to process a whole lot of emails, I don't get interrupted and so I stay focused longer and I don't feel like a slave to my emails.

Occasionally, when someone asked me why I hadn't replied to their email, I had to tell them that I was not checking my emails all the time anymore, but I never encountered resistance or criticism. In fact people are generally surprised, supportive and curious to see if it works, even if they say "it's not for me, I have too much going on, I can't afford to miss my emails".

What about you, how often do you check your emails? Have you ever tried to close Outlook for a while? I'd be interested to know.