Five Ways to Use
Mindfulness to Manage Your Email
What if you could press “pause” on your day at any
moment? In One Second Ahead: Enhance Your Performance at Work
with Mindfulness, Rasmus Hougaard, Jacqueline Carter and Gillian Coutts say you
can. They argue that the best way to address the constant distractions that
come our way is to take one second to be mindful and to make good choices that
help us to remain focused and calm.
In the following excerpt
from the book, Hougaard provides five guidelines for being more mindful when
using email.
Regardless of your job,
your location, or your industry, email probably takes up a significant portion
of your time at work — while not always producing the best results. In this
technique, I offer five simple ways mindfulness can make you more efficient and
effective at using email, as well as other electronic forms of communication
like texting, office messaging systems and the like.
Guideline #1: Avoid Email Addiction
How often do you check
your email? A few times a day? Hourly? Every time that gadget in your pocket
buzzes or lights up? Can you honestly go without checking your email for any
significant stretch of time?
If not, you’re not alone.
One report shows 60% of Americans check their email on vacation and 25% become
restless and unwell after just three days without access to email. In fact,
doctors have estimated 11 million Americans suffer from “email addiction.”
If you think this sounds
crazy, think again.
Email dependency is
principally the same as any other type of dependency. When you receive a
grateful message from a client, praise from your boss, an interesting article
or a funny joke, your brain releases dopamine — a neurotransmitter released in
the brain that makes you feel good. Craving that lift from a nice or funny
email creates a tendency to check your email more and more often.
Mindfulness training puts
you better in tune with your thoughts, feelings and cravings. When you get the
urge to check your email for its own sake, observe it. Before you automatically
succumb to that urge, pause. Take just one second. And in that second, you’ll
come to see there’s nothing necessarily automatic about your responses to
stimuli. You have a choice.
Sometimes, one second of
mindful contemplation is all it takes to resist an automatic impulse. There are
a number of things you can do to increase your chances of success in mitigating
or avoiding email addiction. The first is to eliminate all notifications.
Guideline #2: Kill All Notifications
Having your email always
on, even if only in the background, can create a lot of unnecessary “noise”
both in the lives of individuals and within functioning organizations. One of
the simplest ways to create more time and improve mental focus is to eliminate
unnecessary noise. When it comes to email, you can do yourself a favor by
switching off your email notifications, pop-up windows, alarms, and ring tones.
Doing so will keep your time between designated email sessions clear for other,
more important work.
Over the next couple of
days, pay attention to what happens to your focus, your productivity, and your
well-being each time you’re distracted by an email notification. Then try
working for a couple days with the notifications switched off. After that, you
can make an informed decision about what works best for you.
A lot of the time,
getting a new email pulls our focus away from the job at hand, forcing us to
shift from task to task. The next guideline for mindful emailing is to stop
that shifting before it starts.
Guideline #3: Mind Your Switch Time
Addicted or not, many
people leave their email open all day long. It helps them feel like they’re
perpetually productive and constantly up to date. Always online, they often
answer emails shortly after receiving them. That might be helpful if someone
needs an immediate response, but it can also cause its own problems.
It takes your brain
several seconds to concentrate on a new email, and then the same time again to
return your focus to your previous work — or perhaps even longer, if you’ve
lost your place or your train of thought. Besides taking up time, shifting back
and forth between tasks uses up a lot of energy, making you less effective
overall.
To most effectively
minimize your switch time, remember two rules for mental effectiveness: Focus
on what you choose and choose your distractions mindfully. If you allow every
new email that hits your inbox to distract you, you’re not choosing your
distractions mindfully.
Beyond turning off your
notifications and minding your switch time, you can structure your emailing in
a way that ensures the most effective use of your hours in the office or on the
job.
Guideline #4: Never First Thing in the Morning
In the first half of the
morning, the brain is generally most alert, most focused and most creative.
While many people open their email first thing in the morning, that’s not the
best use of that period of exceptional focus and creativity.
Opening your email first
thing in the morning immediately draws you into an onslaught of short-term
problems. As your brain adapts to the pace of email, your early morning
creative energy dissipates. Choosing email as your first task of the day can be
a wasted opportunity to use your mind at its highest potential. Instead, try
waiting at least half an hour to an hour after you get to work before checking
your inbox.
Whenever you ultimately
decide to schedule your email sessions, be sure to put these sessions on your
calendar as fixed activities, with the rest of your activities planned around
them.
Guideline #5: Secure Focus Time
If you’re checking and
responding to emails all day, you’re not fully focused on your work, on your
emails or on anything else. Instead of shifting your attention whenever an
email arrives, allocate only certain, fixed times during the day to fully focus
on email.
Sometimes, seemingly
small changes to our daily work lives can have an enormous impact. This is one
of those times. When securing your own focus time, consider these questions:
how often, how long and when?
Reprinted from One Second Ahead, by Rasmus Hougaard,
Jacqueline Carter, and Gillian Coutts, published 2015. Reproduced with
permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/five-ways-to-use-mindfulness-to-manage-your-email/?utm_source=kw_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2015-11-13
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