Swimming Through a Flood of Emails

Written By: Carisa Peters

Right after Christmas, I took a trip that kept me out of the office for two weeks. As I was catching up on emails and other work last week, I came across an interesting article that I wanted to share. Here’s What Happened When I Tried Ignoring My Work Emails for 1 Week details the author’s personal challenge to set aside certain times of the day for checking emails in an effort to reduce distractions and increase efficiency.

The author was inspired by the approach of a CEO she had written about who would simply not answer some of his emails. She wondered what would happen if she tried to do the same between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. After a week of somewhat sticking to the plan, she shared the pros and cons of the exercise and what she learned. Some of the pros were more obvious. She was checking her phone much less which opened her eyes to how often everyone around her was on a phone. She was also able to better assess what was truly an emergent need at work, and what could be moved further down the priority list. “Lesson within a lesson: urgency is subjective.”

The cons of the experiment were the obvious backlog of emails at the end of the week that took the author another week to sort through, and she also felt that ignoring emails would really only work for bosses. “It’s pretty easy to put yourself on email hiatus if you’re running the place, but I doubt this would fly if you were an employee and your boss saw an auto-reply claiming that you were unavailable.” Overall, the experiment allowed her to have more awareness of her approach to checking emails, set her phone aside at certain points in the day to stay focused, and even develop a better way to check and respond to emails in less time.

I really enjoy articles like this where the author documents their experience. I think it helps give realistic examples and perspectives on topics that we might not have previously understood or may have struggled with. I know I have discussed with coworkers on a few different occasions how catching up after being gone almost makes it not worth missing work, so I was immediately drawn to this article. I’m also guilty of checking every email as soon as it comes in, which I have viewed as a distraction on my busy days. I plan to try some of the recommendations made in this article and just be more aware of the overall of my habits with emails and other regular tasks that could be handled differently.