Email is your friend. Email is your enemy.
May 29th, 2007How often do you check your email? Once or twice a day? Obviously it’s not really necessary to check email more regularly than this. Well, speaking from experience, this is a bit of a fantasy world. Hands up everybody who I checks their email at least twenty times a day? Working at a computer all day, there are a lot of distractions, BBC News, Desktop Tower Defense, and amazing blogs about bioinformatics. This made worse by the fact that, as an academic, you’re your own boss and no one is going to slap you on the wrist for not working. The foremost of all these time-suckers is email. Repetitive email checking can waste your time and break your concentration. As well as making it less impotent as a tool for getting things done.
Receiving an email is a reward, of sorts. If someone takes the time to write to you, it’s likely to be something interesting. Talking from experience, when things are going slowly, receiving email is the much needed distraction from the drudgery of slow progress. It’s almost like your mind has been conditioned like a mouse in experiment - pushing the send/receive button to get another piece of cheese.
So how can you beat this debilitating affliction. Well, it’s worth thinking about what you’re expecting when you bash the send and receive button for the thirtieth time. There’s never an email that’s so life changing that it couldn’t have waited for a few hours. Most of the emails I get are along the lines of when the centrifuges are going to be fixed. Obviously it’s a big weight off my mind to know if I have an urgent need to spin something at 3000 rotations per minute, I’ll be able to by Thursday afternoon, but it’s not really worth breaking my trail of thought for. So here’s a few things to try if you think you could do with checking you email less.
Turn off automatic email checking
This is the worst offender. You’re in creative full flow, like a concert pianist, your hands are flying across the keyboard. You’ve almost single handedly solved all the world’s socio-economic problems, then you get the latest chain email from Dave - and the spell is broken. But apparently if you forward the email to ten friends you’ll meet the love of your life by the end of the day. Woo! Where’s my address book?
Get a timer application, and use it
What I find that really helps is to work for about 40 minutes without checking email, websites RSS or anything. Just 40 minutes of me working on whatever I’m supposed to. Then I check my email, RSS, get some water, stretch. Then go back and do another 40 minutes. I use Minuteur for the Mac but I’m sure there are plenty of other timer apps out there.
Don’t let email be the first thing you check in the morning
I know this really tempting, and a hard thing not to do. But if first thing in the morning is your most productive time, wouldn’t it be great use time on something that’s going to push your work forward? I try and get at least one thing done before I check RSS feeds, news articles, and of course, reply to email.
Use a system to deal with your email effectively
Not so much as a distraction but more for piece of mind. The worst thing about checking emails too regularly, is that nothing gets done about them. Once they’re read, and the waiting-to-be-read highlight is gone, and its difficult to know which ones need to be dealt with. They’re all jumbled together in the inbox, or organised into folders such as “lab”, “talks”, “home”, and so forth However this doesn’t identify the emails that require something to be done about. I recommend the inbox zero system. Two folders, one for emails that you need to do something about, and one that you’re waiting for somebody else to do something about. Everything else gets deleted. I sort my inbox daily, based on these two criteria, and clear my todo folder every Friday. Easy.
And finally, sometimes it’s just better to get away from distractions completely. I wrote this article in about two hours in coffee shop without any wireless. No email, websites, or RSS.
May 30th, 2007 at 8:56 am
The “inbox zero” concept is something that I operate now, but is borne out of applying David Allens “Getting Things Done” workflow.
Anything that arrives in the inbox is filtered.
The first thing to think about is “Is it actionable?”. If not, then you need to decide whether to trash it, store it as reference material, or stick it into a ‘tickler’ file for later perusal.
If it is actionable then you have a choice too. If the action takes less than 2 minutes, do it immediately. If the action is for someone else, delegate it. If it is a scheduable item, schedule it. If it is an action for you that is going to take more than 2 minutes but is not one you wish to schedule it goes on the ‘next actions’ list of things - effectively your to do. If it requires a new project in your project system, plan the project.
This is a very simple way of keeping the inbox at zero, which is an extremely relaxing way to live, but you do need good support structures for your calendaring/next action/references whether on computer or on paper. Personally if it needs to be thought about, I print it out, file any attachments, stick the printout in the in-box, and then when I do my in-box processing for GTD, plan it then.
Going to turn off the 10 minute email checker in my email client this very minute….
May 30th, 2007 at 9:34 am
First thing I did today was check my work email, my hotmail, GoogleReader(a tip from you) and then a post on bioinformaticszen abouting how much time I have already wasted on my day. Thanks Mike.
On a serious note, I couldn’t agree more. Sitting in front of a PC all day can lead to distractions and I suppose we require more discipline than the wet lab scientist as messing around in a lab is not advised and probably punishable by death.
May 30th, 2007 at 9:36 am
If the e-mail is used as a real-time communication system this way to deal with it fail.
Anyway you are half right. If you are in a creative full flow, the automatic checking e-mail system is going to interrupt you.
I think we have not to re-invent the wheel but go for the easy.
Like for a phone call. You are going to answer and say “plz, call me later”.
So, for the e-mail, just leave it in the not read status, and keep on what you are doing.
ok. I’m lying. I’m going to check my e-mails.
May 30th, 2007 at 10:42 am
You want us to actually work !? Are you crazy :). The first thing I do in the morning is check my email/RSS feeds/content alerts. By the way, you forgot to mention the time we spend writing blog posts and looking at trackbacks/google analytics/etc :).
June 2nd, 2007 at 8:11 pm
I check RSS feeds only about once per week, so those aren’t really troublesome.
About email being a distraction, you are surely right, but it mostly depends on our personality. When I’m deep in thought over the biological interpretation of my results, sometimes I don’t even notice that emails have arrived. I keep automatic checking on for this reason.
Also it depends on the way you work. I’m more tied to the “wet lab people” than my coleagues so I often get messages from them asking for clarifications and suggestions.
Useless mails (forwards, etc.) are deleted without even being read.
June 4th, 2007 at 9:31 pm
Hi Guys,
As always thanks for your comment, they’re very much appreciated.
@Dan. I read a lot about Dave Allen’s “Getting things done” on the web, but I’ve never read the book. There are many websites dedicated to this philosophy, 43folders is the most famous. There’s even flickr and delicious tags - GTD. Using a moleskine, I mentioned previously, I think is also part of GTD.
@Kieren. It’s true wet-lab biologists have, inherently, more discipline, but we have to think more for ourselves. I live with three wet lab biologists so I can give an example. Take PCR, sometimes it won’t work, and often no-one knows why. The answer to this is to repeat the experiment a few more times, then maybe start twiddling the reagents. This can end up taking weeks to solve.
If a program doesn’t work for us, there’s going to be a logical explanation for it, we have to think what’s gone wrong, work through it, and fix it. This isn’t to denigrate the work wetlab scientists carry out, but sometimes the lab bench and the informatician’s desk are worlds apart in the problems we have to face.
@ Michele. You’re right, if you’re waiting for an important email or in an email conversation it’s probably not a good idea to turn of your email client!
@ Pedro. I try to limit writing my posts to Fridays or in a local coffee shop in the weekend. As for responding to comments on my blog, it’s whenever I get a free moment in evenings. Which as you can see in the delay in my response, is not often. Plus there’s the stuff you don’t see - upgrading wordpress for new releases, fixing apache, mysql and other linux problems. Running this blog takes up about twice the time I thought it would when I first conceived it. It used to be that I was writing articles every night of the week until I set myself a goal of one longish article a week. I need a life outside blogging.
@ Luca. You’re definitely right about the personality type. And I’ve definitely got the wrong one. When things start getting dull or repetitive, that’s when I’m clicking the “send/recieve” or “refresh RSS” buttons every two minutes. That’s why focusing on a little bit of discipline has helped me a lot.