Emails, emails, emails!
A client once ran “a zero-email-inbox” competition with a peer. That’s honorable towards others — but harmful to yourself.
Incoming messages are not only a big distraction for teenagers! They got us too.
Out of curiosity, I regularly ask my teenage nieces: “How many times per day do you activate your smartphone?” 356, 236, 178, … times is the shocking truth.
But our management of incoming work messages (as emails) isn’t any better! A recent study of the MyKinsey Global Institute announced:
The average professional spends 30% of their workday reading and responding to emails. This leads to 11 hours of email management every week. Another study stated that participants checked their email inbox about 77 times on average per day.
The harm of constant email checking is clear:
We waste time and especially fragment our focus. How? As we switch between emails and tasks that often, our brain capacity slows down as we have to refocus again and again. We get less efficient, feel mentally overloaded. We feel busy all day, but get little tasks done.
In my professional experience, at the core of these hindering behaviors are harmful beliefs such as:
“I have to respond right away.“ #Perform
“I have to be available at all times.“ #PeoplePlease
This negative thinking, these harmful mindsets lead us to “the bad habit“ of checking our inbox at all times!
As an expert in Mindset & Behavior Change, I recommend you to take these steps getting out of the slump:
Step 1 — What’s the harmful beliefs you grew and hold on to wrongly? Detect them.
Step 2 — Some time soon I‘ll share about email-batching — and a research-based trick on how to do it right.
What do you take away from this post? Share with me, hi@evagruber.org.