It’s time for a new habit around email.

The habit of checking our email and refreshing over and over throughout the day is common to many who use email for work. When it dings, lights up, or pops up…it pulls your attention away. It may be for a split second just to read the notification, or you might end up clicking into it and taking care of it right then.

You need to stop checking your inbox constantly, rapid switching in and out of your email decreases your productivity.

According to the American Psychological Association --  “Doing more than one task at a time, especially more than one complex task, takes a toll on productivity. Psychologists who study what happens to cognition (mental processes) when people try to perform more than one task at a time have found that the mind and brain were not designed for heavy-duty multitasking, noting mental overload can result in catastrophe. Multitasking can take place when someone tries to perform two tasks simultaneously, switch from one task to another, or perform two or more tasks in rapid succession.”

Estimates say if you’re average, you spend thirteen hours a week consulting emails. More fun reading if you want to dig deeper into this:

• This Medium article - “Stop Checking Your Email All The Time”

• This book “Unsubscribe: How to Kill Email Anxiety, Avoid Distractions, and Get Real Work Done”.

How do we break this cycle and be at our utmost performance while saving time?

Turn off all new email notifications, and start batch processing your emails.

Managing your notifications is essential in our modern workplace. Turning off your notifications is a key to success. Push notifications like badges and banners on your phone and desktop need to be turned off also.

Once the notifications are off, schedule time for yourself in your day as email time. It’s designated times during the day where you go through the 4D process we talked about in our last post to process the emails in your inbox. For some people who used to check email constantly, it might start as the last 10-15 minutes of every hour. Work toward 1-2 times in the morning, and 1-2 times in the afternoon.

Timothy Ferris wrote in his book: The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich, how he begins only checking for emails at certain periods of the day, and finishing them within a set time-frame. As far as he was concerned, the emails stopped happening for the remainder of the day. Then he would increase the batching to only particular days of the week, until eventually he only checks his email once a week!

By checking it only when there’s enough to process, you’re limiting the time it takes to check and switch tasks while batch-processing your emails. This allows you to focus on the important things you need to be working on, and more important things in your life.

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I’m Brian. At age 4, I was diagnosed with insulin dependent (type 1) diabetes and told that I was going to have a harder life that was likely 10-20 years shorter than normal. I’ve lived my best life every day since then, because you only get one chance to live it. I created Productivity Gladiator because I saw what a difference it made to share small and specific actions you can take right now, right away, to achieve better work life balance, be more productive, and live your best life right now, today, not wait until retirement. I want you to start doing the things you WANT to do, not get stuck chasing what you NEED to do. If any of this resonates with you, send me a note. It brings me joy to share this passion with you.