Whether you get your email from usual POP/IMAP servers, or have a webmail (e.g. GMail), you can always find countless small pieces of software that will notify you the very second you get a new email, with various gizmos blinking or beeping on your computer.
Reading email takes time; answering email takes even more time. Of course, you’re always free to just look at the notifications and postpone the actual reading; you’re also free to read your email as it flows into your inbox and answer them all at once, later in the day. But come on, let’s face it:
- When you’re concentrated on your current work and there’s a blinking gizmo telling you that you have 30 new messages (which your brain interprets as “Hey, stop! Danger! New stuff arriving!”), can you just ignore it, not go check your email (at least the subject lines), and keep working, undisturbed? Well, I couldn’t.
- You’re reading your new email and you find out that you’re going to want/need to write an anwser. Can you just go back to what you were doing and stop thinking about it until your chosen “email answering” time comes? Well, I couldn’t. I’d just start thinking about what I’m going to answer (and this can be a lot of thinking if there are numerous emails I want to answer), even if I’m trying to concentrate on something else.
I’m sure lots and lots of “optimize your time” books talk about this already, but since I haven’t read them, pardon me if I’m saying blindingly obvious things.
I don’t think the brain’s conscious concentration capabilities are very multitask. It needs a few minutes, while switching from one task to another, to get running at “full speed” again, especially if the two tasks are very different from each other. If you’re concentrating very well on task A and, for some reason, need to switch to task B for half an hour, and then come back to A, your brain needs time to adapt, both ways. On the other hand, if you make sure that nothing else will disturb you for a potentially unlimited amount of time in order to concentrate on a given task until it’s finished, you’re likely to be very, very efficient (at least this is true for me). By “nothing else”, I mean really nothing: no phone, no email, no co-worker entering your office to ask you something, no family member entering your room asking you where the hell you put her small statue of the purple bald bear washing its toes with sour cream, etc.
If you’ve set an automatic email notification every half an hour (which is already quite optimistic, I reckon?), and you actually go and check and/or answer your new emails each time, you’re spending extra time (maybe like one minute and a half, twice) to let your mind concentrate on the new task (reading email), and then concentrate again on what you were doing. So, if this is 6 minutes every hour, and if you’re spending 10 hours at work everyday (rough approximation :-p), you’ve wasted an hour just for switching between things, and that’s only for one day.
Okay, maybe those numbers aren’t accurate, and I don’t mean to be so anal about wasting a little time (hey, who’s that prick who doesn’t even allow his co-workers to enter his office to have a little chat?). But still, I think it is a good idea to prevent yourself from checking and answering your email more than, say, three times per day. If you run into anxious people who expect you to answer their email within half an hour and can’t wait until your next batch of answers, just tell them to give you a call! It’s really nice to be able to be so open and available for communication, but real concentration is not essentially a collective state of mind, and I find that when I can manage to set up a three or four-hour “Do NOT disturb” zone in my schedule sometimes, my productivity increases *a lot*.
How are you guys managing this?
PS : sorry for people who tried to access my website (or the whylinuxisbetter.net site) yesterday, my server had a few minor problems just after my post, bad luck. It’s all fixed now.
You’re quite right; most time management books/courses recommend turning off automatic email checking in your mail client, and setting aside a couple of hours every day for dealing with emails.
right you are. here is also another one text on the theme:
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/4438.html (Tips for Mastering E-mail Overload)
Whenever I need a lot of concentration, I quit the mail client. If not, my notification is not very intrusive and has three states: new mail, unread mail, no unread mail. It doesn’t blink
Also, I’m using a plugin to light the mail LED on my laptop on when there’s new mail. I don’t see it when concentrated, but can check my mail from across the room at home
I have an icon in my toolbar which polls my mail. No automatic checking.
So when I’m working I won’t have any popup; when I’m about to be done I click the icon and then save my work; by the time I’ve saved my offlineimap run is done with syncing my email.
*Some* emails are important and require immediate reading/answering, others don’t.
I think email software should allow for this kind of setup… I want to be notified with blinking icons only when my boss or supervisor sends me a message, not when I receive an email from a mailing list.
I have Evolution checking mail every ten minutes.
However, I have it in its own workspace, and I have no notification of any kind about email. So, while it steadily dribbles in, I get absolutely no feedback about it – I have to actually break off what I’m doing and jump to the mail workspace if I want to know about it.
But if I’m in the middle of something I’m of course too preoccupied to actually do so; instead my mail will naturally wait until I hit a lull in my workflow and I remember checking it. So by removing any feedback I’ll get to the email when it disrupts me the least to do so. The same goes for my webmail (gmail), by the way – with no feedback, I don’t go to the gmail site unless I need a breather in any case.
My favourite is someone walking over to my desk and asking: “I’ve just sent you an email. Have you read it?”. Of course I haven’t! You have just sent it!
I have stopped thinking of email as an instant form of communication. I check email at only certain times of the day. I am a sysadmin and my job is naturally interrupt driven. If I want to get any of my projects done I cannot afford to be interrupted more than I already am .
I generally receive important email during certain times of the day and I arrange my time according to these times.
You mileage may vary, but I use some intelligent filtering on the mail server to allow me to prioritise email into different mail directories or inboxes. I then can set my email client to check these inboxes at different times. Also separating private email and work email is essential! I have different accounts for each.
I found that the best think to do when you need to pay close attention to somethink your doing is to: close email client, close irc client, close all messaging program, raise the handset, switch off the mobile phone (i.e. completelly isolete yuor self from external world) and listen to classical music.
As I’m easly getting sidetracked the above is the only way I can manage to produce code and study thinks.
I strugling with my self to reduce my innate multitasking, this simply lead me to dissatisfaction becouse I end up with too many thinks started and nothing completed.
Some thoughts around this subject can be found by googling for “GTD” or “Getting Things Done”. Its basic philosophy is to keep a list of everything you need to do or want to do. To manage the size of this list you ruthlessly remove items that aren’t needed anymore, and split the remaining list in ‘action’ items and ‘hold’ items. Removed items that are needed for future reference end up in an ‘archive’.
This (simplified form of GTD) is easely applied to email by using 3 mailfolders: action, hold, archive. For different projects you can create individual archives.
There’s more to it, like ‘the 2 minute rule’, use of agenda and a future projects list. Look it up for yourself but steer clear of the hype surrounding it, and use only what works for you (e.g.: start simple).
You are correct!
What I do find useful in Gmail is notification of one someone also replied to a thread I am replying to.