Email creates ‘busy’ trap

“Every day I check my emails over breakfast and answer anything really urgent. On the train I answer as many as possible before I hit the office.
By the time I get to my desk I’ve processed dozens of emails and it is constant throughout the day. I have to confess it’s usually around four o’clock in the afternoon before I get to do what I consider the real work of the day.
It’s really stressful… I feel like I’m just reacting all the time”

Senior Manager, major Australian blue chip firm.

Emails can obviously be a highly productive method of communication in any workplace. But there’s no doubt they cause of a lot of problems including “lost” time. And that’s leaving aside the issue of personal emails.
Recent research shows that people who check emails every ten minutes could be losing productivity equivalent of a full working day per week.
In my training workshops people defend the constant interaction with email as a necessity to do their work.
“I’ve got to respond. People expect to be answered instantly. It would look like I wasn’t doing my work if I didn’t constantly check my emails.”
The question is really: Are we being busy or are we being productive? And that can partly be answered by looking at the epidemic of multitasking.
Robert Croker, Ed.D., is chair of the Human Resource Training and Development department at Idaho State University. Croker’s study of brain-based learning has shown that the human brain is not designed for multitasking.
Croker says. "A computer is designed to multitask. A human brain is not designed to function optimally in a multitask environment."
Each time a person switches back and forth between tasks, the brain goes through several time-consuming activities, * including:

• a selection process for choosing a new activity,
• turning off the mental rules needed to do the first task,
• turning on the mental rules needed to do the second task,
• orienting itself to the conditions currently surrounding the new task

Getting into a state of ‘flow’ – the state of truly productive and creative concentration – can take 15 to 20 minutes. So if you are developing a report, proposal, presentation or any other major communication piece and you get interrupted by email alerts it could easily take you four times as long to complete that task!
Workplace-organizer guru Julie Morgenstern, has a great solution I highly recommend in my Neverfail Email Workshops and it's simply this: Never check e-mail first thing in the morning. Yes, you heard right! Start the day with a plan and to do list before email has a chance to take over!

• Productivity experts unanimously agree that checking emails 3 times per day and turning the ‘you’ve got mail’ alerts off, will save buckets of time and reduce stress.
• Other options to tame the email monster…
• Put a limit the amount of time you spend on emails throughout the day.
• Allocate half hour blocks, for example. Complete the most important matters during that time limit.
• Provide very simple and focused messages when writing or responding to others.
• Ask colleagues to call you (yes on the telephone) or come and see you if it’s urgent.

Choose when you use the technology…. Turn off ‘push’ technology on your smart phone - that’s very smart!
Email is a great tool if we control it. But sometimes it seems to be controlling us!

[* based on research published in The Journal of Experimental Psychology and science journal NeuroImage.]