Stop checking your email … in your dreams
By Marc Perton
Sage advice, from Perton then, and Hyatt today. Unfortunately, I’ve almost never followed it, and I suspect Hyatt hasn’t either. In today’s always-connected world, with Outlook, Blackberrys, Gmail Mobile, text messaging and all the rest, it’s impossible to stay away from email. And the worst part of the always-on environment isn’t the mail itself, it’s the culture that has grown up around it. Even if you somehow have enough discipline to avoid email all day, chances are good that doing so will be detrimental to your career. Colleagues, clients and the rest of the connected world expect everyone else to be connected 24/7 as well, and that’s even truer now than back in 1997 when I was at iVillage.
One of the first rules of just about every personal productivity plan is to avoid constantly checking your email. It’s part of the GTD credo, it’s mentioned about a dozen times a week on Lifehacker, and I recently caught the latest iteration of it in Michael Hyatt’s blog, courtesy of (of course) Lifehacker: “Unless you are in a customer service position where you have to be “always-on,” you should check email no more than two or three times a day.” Hyatt’s advice is very similar to a tip I made about ten years ago on iVillage, as part of a set of Five Tips for Email Users:
Checking your email frequently is one of the big time-wasters of the modern office. Avoid it if you can! Set aside two periods when you know it will be quiet—once at 8:30 in the morning and again at 6:00 p.m., for example—and check your mail then.
Sage advice, from Perton then, and Hyatt today. Unfortunately, I’ve almost never followed it, and I suspect Hyatt hasn’t either. In today’s always-connected world, with Outlook, Blackberrys, Gmail Mobile, text messaging and all the rest, it’s impossible to stay away from email. And the worst part of the always-on environment isn’t the mail itself, it’s the culture that has grown up around it. Even if you somehow have enough discipline to avoid email all day, chances are good that doing so will be detrimental to your career. Colleagues, clients and the rest of the connected world expect everyone else to be connected 24/7 as well, and that’s even truer now than back in 1997 when I was at iVillage.
