Email Monitoring: Finding the Balance
Tuesday, February 9, 2010 at 7:09PM Conventional time management wisdom typically says that you should check your email as rarely as possible. Some time management expert advocate a more extreme version of this approach than others. I have commonly seen put forth the idea that you should check your email no more than once or twice per day.
This advice has always seemed simplistic to me. The first question is, which email address are we talking about here in the first place? People who work desk jobs for an employer typically have at least two email addresses, a personal email and a work email. Secondly, what kind of responsiveness are you looking to achieve during what hours? If self-employed, the answers to these questions may depend on your client expectations and your own willingness to meet those particular expectations, as well as how well you do at setting shared expectations with clients. For instance, I am currently self-employed. My client agreements state that I will respond to email within one business day unless I'm on vacation, and informally I would like to respond to most emails in more like four business hours.
At most of my previous workplaces, I needed to respond to email much more quickly than that, and thus needed to check my email far more frequently as well. If employed in a corporate environment, it can be a lonely path to not check your email every 5 minutes during the workday and then be on-call to your Blackberry all night, responding to emails within 30-60 minutes of receipt-- if that's what most of your fellow team members are doing and what your manager, clients and stakeholders expect.
You can still set your own boundaries of course, perhaps setting boundaries that are a compromise of some sort. You might even be able to change the work culture's approach to email entirely over time if you make that your goal, but being a change agent is not without cost and you'd have to decide whether that's an initiative you want to invest in. Or, you can of course leave your job and carefully scrutinize this aspect of your corporate culture when you decide to accept a job. But unless you have a job that doesn't use email much or are lucky enough to have an assistant screen your email for you, most people who work in the corporate world will need to check their email more than once or twice in a day.
Personal email is more simple in some ways, and more complex in others. Personal email and the many social media tools out there that we also use to interact online are not just basic communication tools, but also social scenes and sources of entertainment. Many people turn to their email or get onto Facebook/Twitter whenever they are lonely or bored, firing up various programs or websites hoping to connect with someone emotionally for a brief moment or see something interesting and absorbing pop up. Others will just check their email/social media sites whenever they feel momentarily frustrated by a task - a form of procrastination that can waste a staggering amount of time if you do it a lot. In other instances, family or friends might send you time-sensitive updates on logistics and assume you'll see them immediately, or send you dramatic news and assume you know it immediately and will respond right away. Some people just check their email constantly and have forgotten why-- they've gotten used to doing so over time changing the habit can be painful and challenging.
You definitely don't want to be one of those people who checks their email constantly as a habit and feels pressured to respond immediately to everything that comes to you. At the same time, I personally decided that I didn't want to check my email just once a day either. As with many things, a more relaxed and balanced approach works best for me. I process my email at intervals throughout the day, sometimes focused more on quick scanning for anything urgent and others focused more on methodical, disciplined processing and sorting. I am still fine-tuning how I want to work with both email and especially social media sites now that I am self-employed. The allocation of my time is considerably less structured now, and my clients don't expect instant email responsiveness as a matter of course. At the same time, I note that I've gotten used to checking my email more often than I currently need to, and habits like that are tough to change. So, I expect a new email balance to emerge for me in the next month or so as I fully adjust to how I want to use these tools now versus how I have used them in the past in different settings.
To find your own email balance, I recommend considering the following:
Responsiveness.
What turnaround time are you comfortable with for email? What minimum responsiveness do others expect from you right now, and are you willing to challenge or renegotiate those expectations if you don't like them? Consider different contexts here, such as work vs. personal, and daytime vs. nighttime.Impact on your productivity.
When you are doing creative, thoughtful work, how long do you prefer to work in before you take a break? You probably don't want to interrupt yourself more often than that, unless you've decided that responsiveness is more important to some degree than productivity.Purpose.
For personal email on your personal time, the question of purpose might be less about productivity and responsiveness, and more about lifestyle choices and priorities. Most people really don't need to be wired into their personal email/social media throughout the day, but if you enjoy it and are comfortable with how it impacts the rest of what you accomplish in a day, perhaps that's okay with you. Or, you may decide that you are using your email to procrastinate, and need to set limits for yourself and cut back.
In my opinion, setting successful limits on email use is all about clarifying what you want from email, doing a thoughtful cost/benefit assessment, and making mindful choices. The one very specific tip that I will offer is that if you have pop-ups or sounds that notify you when new emails come in, turn them off! Even if you decide that in some contexts you will be checking your email extremely often, I encourage you to choose a time interval that you check proactively... rather than allowing every new email that comes in to stop you in your tracks and change your focus.
How often do you check your email... and why? Do you think your approach is the right balance for you, or does something need to change?
Reader Comments (3)
Funny. I got an iPhone a few months ago and have been checking my e-mail constantly since then. Doing it that way makes it seem like so much less of a time sink. I never sit down and have to wade through 200 useless bits of junk mail to work - I just delete them when they come in and flag the important stuff. Then when I'm at my desk I can focus on those few things that really deserve my attention.
As an added bonus, if something is on fire in my inbox - like a last minute job from an editor - I can respond immediately. That always puts me ahead of the curve in a pretty competitive freelance market.
Thanks for commenting Sierra! Sounds like you've found a system that works for you. For many people checking email a lot such as you describe takes on an almost addictive quality that makes it important to have a measured, careful relationship with the medium. The more they check it, the more they feel compelled to check it, and rather than choosing to process their email often, they end up feeling anxiety anytime they don't get to it. Also, they'll often end up turning to email instead of doing something more productive, whereas it sounds like you have avoided that sense of compulsion and also found a way to genuinely fit email processing into moments that for you might otherwise be unproductive.
Just goes to show that what works for each person will be different :)
I have a reminder at work to check my home email at noon every day, because I work on a computer so much during the day that I found I wasn't keeping up with it at home.
I turned off all my email notifications at work, which I found helped me hugely. I do try to schedule chunks of time on my calendar to work on some projects, but when I don't do that, I have a tendency to idly pop back to Outlook every once in a while and see what's up. I try to remind myself that I don't check email when I'm in meetings, so why should it be different when I'm in a meeting with myself?
I refuse to have work email on my cell phone. Nope. No one will die if I don't see that email for a couple of hours.