The Blasted Crossing

“You have mail!”. Wasn’t this one of the catchphrases of the nineties? “You have mail!” was a sound bite in AOL that was played whenever you received a new email and it quickly grew to become an icon of the electronic revolution.

Email was touted as being one of the biggest productivity boosters when it first appeared on the scene. “No more waiting for messages”, “No more lost mail”, and “Send mail instantly!” were some of the more common catch phrases that were associated with it. As more and more people learned about it and started using it, the more messages were flowing around the wires. Today there are millions upon millions of messages floating through cyberspace, and I bet you anything that less than 0.0001% of those messages were of any importance whatsoever. Yet you can always hear somebody saying “but I have to check my email! There’s something really important I’m waiting for!”.

“You have mail!”. They drop everything and away they rush to the computer! They open their email program, type in their username and password and lo and behold! They have a new offer for Viagra! Wow, that was a close call! What if they had missed that email, what would they have done!? Oh the humanity!

Email as a productivity killer

Do you ever have that problem? Constantly being afraid what you might miss if you don’t check your email, and so you check it constantly every 30, 15, maybe 5 minutes? Or you might be working on something, writing a blog post perhaps, doing some banking, buying some stocks, finishing up some work for tomorrow, whatever it may be, then suddenly you get an email and you drop everything you were doing and rush to check it out.

After you answer it, you try to go back to what you were doing, but oh wait! You forgot what you were doing; now you can’t remember whether you were going to add or subtract that money from your account, you decided to subtract. Oops, you’re now overdrawn, your insurance eats away at your savings, you can’t pay your bills, you lose your car, house, dog, and you’re now out on the street!

Ok, maybe that’s a little too melodramatic. Let’s back up. You answer that email, but now you forget what you were doing exactly and you’re going to have to spend another 5 or 10 minutes trying to get back to where you were. I hope whatever was in that email was worth wasting away 5 or 10 minutes of your life.

This is a simple scenario, now imagine how it really is, you’re working on more than one thing, and you keep getting an email every half an hour or so, throughout an 8 hour day, if it takes you just 5 or 10 minutes to get back to what you were doing before that email arrived, and you get 5 or so emails per day, that’s 25 to 50 minutes a day you’re losing!

Increasing your productivity

Now obviously some emails absolutely cannot wait, and I understand that, but what about the rest of them? Are they really that important, or do you just THINK that they’re that important?

Try not responding to just 1 email and see if the world explodes. If it doesn’t, start cutting back on the amount of time you spend reading and responding to email. Check your email once every 4 hours or so to start with, just before your lunch break. After all, you have work to do too.

If the email truly is important and is a matter of life and death, then whoever sent it to you will almost assuredly try to contact you in a more direct manner, through the telephone for instance.

If someone thinks you are being inconsiderate because you are not answer your emails, then you can tell them that when they are prepared to give you 5 minutes of their life in exchange for 5 minutes of yours (the time it would take you to answer it and get back to what you were doing) then you will answer them as soon as the email comes in. Ask them if their work is more important than yours, or if their life is somehow more important than yours.

Stop wasting time and do what you are supposed to be doing so that you can finish up and enjoy some of your time that you have. Don’t waste it frivolously answer every single little message that comes your way.

That’s all I have to say for now. I’d be happy to hear some of your responses. And don’t forget to subscribe to the feed at the top (the orange-y-goodness button).