Without a doubt, the single most destructive weapon to my time management, and hence my true productivity, is email. No matter how disciplined I try to be, planning my day the day before, listing and prioritizing my to-do list, allocating my time to each task in advance, one little action of opening my email inbox can instantly derail my best laid plans and intentions.
The psychology behind email management is an interesting study. The best organizers say to never check your email before 10AM, and Timothy Ferris, writer of The 4-Hour Workweek suggests checking it just once a day or less and letting your business associates know that in your email signature. I’m beginning to see the light, realizing I’m an email addict, (the first step in any 12 step program). I recently turned off the automatic function for checking my email, opting instead to manually press the receive button when I’m ready to read email. But I have a long way to go. I catch myself hitting the receive button every several minutes, and realize I am using it as a crutch to subconsciously (or consciously) avoid doing what is really important at the time.
The biggest challenge with email is remaining proactive and operating my day in a purposeful and meaningful way. Email has the mesmorizing power of turning me into a Pavlovic trained canine, responding instinctively to the bell announcing the receipt of email, carrying with it the promise of new opportunities, certainly, I must believe, changing my life for the better.
If our time was just stolen by the sole act of reading our email we might be ok. But the reality is, most emails lead to additional required actions; a quick reply, forwarding to a friend, visiting a website, which leads us to another website, which leads to another…(how many hours has that alone taken from our productive time?)
I believe that our ability to conquer this phenomenon in our business lives will have a great bearing on our ultimate success. Let’s get a handle on this amazingly powerful productivity tool before it has the opposite effect of what we expected, robbing us of time we could be spending with family and friends, and replacing true productivity with a false sense of being busy and getting things done.
