Working in a cubicle and being constantly wired outside of it results in the nasty habit of checking up on email every few minutes while at work, in the evenings and even over the weekend. And surprisingly most of us fail to realize how much inefficiency this mail obsession builds into our work.
If you can immediately identify with this issue here’s how you can control it:
Send out emails in batches at fixed times:Have an email-checking schedule and do not deviate from it. Apparently, office workers in the US spend 28% of their time switching between tasks due to interruption, and 40% of the time, an interrupted task is not resumed within 24 hours.
Send and read email at different times:
Go offline and respond to all email from a local program such as Outlook to avoid having the outgoing flow interrupted by immediate responses.
Don’t scan email if you can’t immediately fix problems:
For example don’t scan the inbox on Friday evening or over the weekend if you might encounter work problems that can’t be addressed until Monday. This is the perfect way to ruin a weekend with preoccupation.
Don’t use the inbox for reminders or as a to-do list:
Don’t mark items as “unread,” star them, or otherwise leave them in the inbox as a constant reminder of required actions. This just creates visual distraction while leading you to evaluate the same items over and over.
Set rules for email-to-phone escalation:
Define how many email exchanges will prompt you to pickup the phone for a resolution and prevent a million more emails on the same subject.
By Tim Ferris via Lifehacker
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