Email Is Not A Tractor Beam For You To Point At People

Email is not some sort of weapon you point and aim at someone with the expectation that they drop what they are doing and turn over whatever bit of information you seek. Unfortunately though, that is exactly how email is used all too often.

I've even had co-workers send me an email, then use Skype or some other IM tool to see if I had received it and opened it yet before their mouse's button had fully recovered after being used to press "Send." I am sure you have experienced the same thing on occasion.

Lifehacker has run two excellent articles on this issue and I strongly encourage you to check them out. The first is "Email Is Not Broken; We Are." As you might have guessed, the thrust of the article is as a tool, email works just fine. The problem is, we are misusing it.

The second article is "When You’re Constantly Checking Your Email, You’re Putting Your Needs Behind Everyone Else’s." You might think that as an employee of a company, the needs of everyone else comes before you, but you are wrong. You have a job to do and you are doing your employer a great disservice if your full attention is not on the task at hand. If someone walks into your office and has a critical issue, then you need to make a judgement call as to whether or not that demands your full and immediate attention. However, you do not need to make that same judgement call regarding the 20-30 emails (or more!) that come in during the next hour while you are trying to finish those TPS reports. This article also has an amusing, and accurate, decision tree about when you should check your email.

What can you do right now to regain your productivity?

1. Turn off all email notifications, both on your phone and desktop. If you aren't expecting anything important, having your devices ding and throw up windows at you is about as useful to your productivity as having someone poke you with a cattle prod. I still leave my email on push, and keep Outlook running, but that is for my convenience, so when I need to refer to something, I know everything is up-to-date.
2. Set specific times to check email. I check mine first thing in the morning, around lunch, and at the end of the day religiously. I also may check it at around 3pm.
3. When you check email, clear them all. I have zero unread emails. That doesn't mean do them all. It means clear them. If you can take care of the email in 2 minutes or less, do it. Don't waste anymore time deferring it. If you can't, then file it for future action. See The Secret Weapon for some excellent tips on how to do this effectively. I actually use Evernote coupled with Zendone, which is a web app that automates much of what The Secret Weapon advocates. 

Now you can focus on projects, meetings, or your employees and peers, giving them the attention they deserve. It can take some getting used to, but trust me, once you free yourself from being yanked around by emails as they come in, you'll realize you get more done each week since you waste far less time having to change gears to satisfy the whim of each email.