E-mail calling
While I was watching curling the other night I had my laptop on my knee and was working through my email. I was astonished to discover over my three accounts I had close to 600 emails to review. Granted most of them were subscriptions to other sites, newsletters etc and that number was still ridiculous.
Which got me to thinking about email and how it seems to have taken over our lives. I took a brief break from the work force in June 2004 and returned in January 2006 to find the use of email had exploded in that 18 month period. People were actually emailing to find out if they could phone and talk with you. It seemed as if personal conversation no longer happened. Yet as human beings we are wired to watch and listen, to look for the subtle clues which indicate how the speaker is feeling. Those same clues also indicate sincerity, intent and involvement in the conversation. Email lacks all of this despite the inclusion of smiley faces and other such additions.
The other downside to email is the expectation by the sender that you will reply immediately regardless of what you may be doing. I knew that had gotten out of hand when I got a call one morning from a man saying: ” I sent you an email 10 minutes ago and you haven’t responded.” I said “No, I haven’t and I will get back to you this afternoon” In those days I only checked my email at scheduled times so that I could maintain control over the rest of my work day. I am going back to that as email has the power to distract and derail my plans.
That leads to the obvious: what do we do about this ongoing intrusion into our lives at work and at home? I have taken some simple steps to clean up my act and stop this from happening again.
1. Turned off the notification for the arrival of a new email. All that does is s distract me from the task at hand.
2. I have gone through my list of subscriptions and ruthlessly weeded them out. Let’s be truthful here, if they grew to such staggering proportions and I could weed them out in 3 hours how many was I really reading?
3. Made a commitment to stop reading work email after the end of the work day. That alone gave me free time and mental space to think about something other than work.
4. Stopped checking email first thing in the day, instead wait for an hour to give me time to plan and organize my day.
5. Refuse to respond to email until i have taken the time to think through want I want to say and what my decision will be.
6. Remind myself that any response in email can and may be shared with the world, words once sent cannot be unsent.
Those are the steps I am taking to take control of my life and work back from the email dragon, I’d be interested to know how you handle email.