On the Sanctity of Email, and How It Affects Your Productivity
A Tweet is like saying something loudly at a party with people you only vaguely know.
A Facebook post is like handing out a pamphlet to everyone in a medium-sized suburb.
A LinkedIn post is like handing out an oversized business card at a huge conference or trade show.
An email, however, is like knocking on someone’s door, and that’s where all this analogizing gets interesting.
While you can avoid nearly everything on your Facebook and Twitter feeds, and you can just not log on to LinkedIn, or skim for leads without addressing your newsfeed or timeline, your email inbox is different.
Email is not like paper mail because email is part of so many people’s workflows. When you go outside to get your mail, you’re not also working. You’re going outside to get your mail, and that’s about it. It’s really the only thing you can be doing at that time. Furthermore, you don’t put stuff back in your mailbox if you plan on doing something with it at some point. But we do that with our inboxes all of the time.
To me, the email inbox is that rare thing that is kind of like something in the pre-internet world, but more a thing unto its own. It is a new channel of communication, and a new component of nearly everyone’s workflow. How much email you have in your inbox, how much of it is read, unread, flagged, and tagged, all have an effect on how well you perceive your work to be going.
So I am careful with what I choose to receive via email. Out of the 50 or so popups that I see on peoples’ websites — telling me that I should click to sign up to receive a free e-book (or 2, or 3) and newsletter — I click maybe one. Maybe. I ask myself one simple question before I proceed:
Do I see myself adding this person’s email to my workflow in a positive way?
If the answer is not an immediate “yes”, I do not click. It’s that simple. I think that this is the way that we should all approach guarding our inbox. Your inbox should be a place where no less than 90% of the stuff in it each morning is stuff that adds positively to your workflow. Otherwise, it’s actually sapping quite a bit of cognitive energy, and likely creating roadblocks to your personal and professional productivity. By the time you’ve expended the mental energy to sort through, delete, prioritize, and respond to emails, you’re that much closer to decision fatigue.
When you make a decision — or avoid a temptation — you’re using up the supply of mental energy you have for a day, in the same way that you can only lift a weight so many times before your muscles give up on you.
These days, I guard my inbox. I don’t sign up for alerts that don’t latch directly to something in my existing workflow or project list. I don’t sign up to receive ebooks or tips from people whose work I haven’t read or who I’m not sure that they won’t flood me with the same email message in 10 different ways each month (that same email being “buy my stuff!”).
The bottom line: guard your inbox, because it’s not like your Twitter Feed, Facebook Timeline, or LinkedIn message center. Your inbox is your front doorstep, your office door, the window to your workflow. Guard it as such. It will be a boon to your productivity.
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