Cal Newport has changed his e-mail set-up.
With all that you have on your plate, that may not seem worth attention. But the professor at Georgetown University has produced a succession of books on being productive in an era of information overload. So when he announces that he has fiddled with his own e-mail practices, it’s significant – likely offering insights for your own situation.
In recent years, Prof. Newport has been arguing that how you handle your e-mail is not as important as preventing them from arriving in your inbox in the first place. He has identified a spectre haunting us – the “hyperactive hive mind flow,” in which e-mail bombardments continually change our mental focus. That requires a complicated dance in our neural network that is cognitively hard on us. Reducing e-mail is the best route to reducing those changes in context, in which our mind is forced to grapple repeatedly and quickly with different topics.
But even though he has done that and wasn’t receiving an excessive amount of messages, needing only one 30- to 60-minute block of time daily to handle them (you may be envious), he still found himself battling cognitive exhaustion.
“The problem was not the number of emails I encountered, but the fact they were coming from multiple distinct contexts: my personal life, my academic life, and my writing life. Faced with 20 messages to answer, no single missive in the pile would require more than a few minutes of thinking to dispatch,” he writes on his blog. “The issue is the context switching between messages: a question from a family member, then a meeting request from a student, then a note about an issue with a podcast advertiser – switch, switch, switch. The first reply is easy, by the tenth I’m blocked.”
So Prof. Newport decided to separate those different contexts. He now has three different Google inboxes with their own username, password, and accompanying e-mail addresses. One is for his personal matters, another for his university work, and the third for his books, blog, and associated endeavours. He no longer checks his general e-mail at one point of the day. Instead he looks at these individual inboxes when it is appropriate.
“I can already notice the difference. When every note in a given inbox falls within the same cognitive context, much less friction aggregates as I move from message to message. Furthermore, I can now schedule inbox checks adjacent to appropriate work blocks: checking my writing inbox, for example, at the end of a podcast recording session, when my mind is already thinking about relevant issues,” he says.
Your life may not divide as neatly as his. Three different e-mail accounts may be problematic. But streaming incoming e-mail to folders is commonplace, and maybe it can be arranged to reduce your context switches.
Start-up advisor Sarah Peck urges you to create boundaries around e-mails – for yourself and your team, should you lead one.
“Part of the problem is that there isn’t enough friction. We become inconsiderate in requests for time and attention because email is free and fast. Sending messages speedily makes us think we’re important instead of taking time to really chew on ideas, and it punts work onto other people’s agendas rather than asking us to figure things out ourselves,” she writes in Harvard Business Review.
It starts with your e-mail signature. Write an explanation that tells people how long it might take to receive a reply and what your office hours are. When taking on new clients, starting a new project or adding new members to your team, specify how and when you like to be communicated with, and get their preferences.
Ms. Peck also recommends using your auto-responder “generously” and carving out time to focus on bigger projects by communicating that you are away and when correspondents can receive a reply. And if you oversee a team, then lead by example and demonstrate the importance of boundaries by delaying e-mails you write on weekends or late at night and send them at more appropriate times.
Quick hits
- Our work is increasingly endless as shifts become a thing of the past. Entrepreneur Seth Godin notes that means each of us has to decide what “enough” looks like. He asks you to keep in mind more time isn’t always the answer.
- You can’t learn if you can’t admit failure, advises leadership coach Dan Rockwell. Once a week, pick something you’re working on and say to another person, “I am trying to make this better but it’s not working like I hoped. What suggestions do you have?”
- Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman recommends reducing stress and anxiety with “the psychological sigh,” a different breathing exercise in which you take two breaths in through your nose in succession followed by an extended exhale through your mouth.
- Most effort is wasted on mediocre ideas, says Atomic Habits author James Clear.
- If you want to jazz up your underlines in a Microsoft Office document – adding a different type of line, or even colour – tech writer Allen Wyatt points you to the small down arrow beside the underline command on the ribbon, which offers such options.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston, Ont.-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.
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