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Thoughts on Checking Email First Thing in the Morning
I don’t claim to be a professional organizer, but I can’t deny that there is a close relationship between organization and productivity. Recently my dear friend and nationally renowned professional organizing expert Lorie Marrero of ClutterDiet wrote on her blog about some prevalent productivity advice. I began to write in her comments and then realized I had way too much to say on the topic. So Lorie, thank you for inspiring my blog post this morning! I definitely recommend that you head over to Lorie’s excellent blog and read her post for yourself. My thoughts follow…
The premise of her post is that contrary to popular advice, it’s ok to check email first thing in the morning. For me, the real question is whether or not you are supporting your own focused attention, or sabotaging it. Thank you for reminding me, Lorie, that there is always “sound-bite” advice and then there is the whole story. In this fast-paced media-rich, short-attention span environment we live in, perhaps I’m guilty of too often giving “sound-bite advice.” But I frequently tell people that when it comes to professional advice, the answer to pretty much any question you ask will often be: “it depends.” The same is true here: should you check email first thing in the morning? It depends.
It depends on if you have a handheld device. Believe it or not, there are still many people who don’t, and their only option for email is their computer. But I talk a lot about how technology is making old “time management” advice outdated, and this is a good example – the “old advice” is that you shouldn’t check messages first thing in the morning, because handheld devices first didn’t exist for email, and then weren’t that prevalent. That’s certainly not the case anymore, however I don’t think we’re quite at the point yet, where we can assume that everybody has one.
It depends on if you are an independent professional/self-employed, or if you work in an office. I think this is an important distinction with regard to your email schedule. You are less likely to miss something by foregoing email if you are sitting at your desk in a large office and you decide to tackle your task list instead of checking email. Someone will pop their head in, you’ll overhear something, or they’ll call you.
It depends on if you have time to be proactive that morning, or if you are rushing off to a meeting. The whole point, as Lorie mentioned, of not checking email first thing, is to have some *pro*active time. Don’t go to email first thing, so you can spend some time being proactive, knocking off items on your task list. If you were rushing off to a meeting that morning, you wouldn’t have proactive time anyway, nor would you be able to get sucked in to your email, so checking to see if that meeting has been delayed or canceled is certainly prudent.
It depends on how you’ve trained those with whom you have a relationship. Regarding “digging in our heels and insisting people should behave differently”…I actually don’t think this is what happens most of the time. For the people you don’t interact with often, like the random press request, Lorie is absolutely right. I’d go out on a limb and say the vast majority of actual communication most people get via email (not spam or robomails or newsletters, but actual communication) is from people with whom they have a relationship. And if you have a relationship with them, you’ve probably “trained” them in how to communicate with you, whether you realize it or not. Real estate agents ask me, “how do I get my clients to stop calling me at 9 o’clock at night?” My response: “stop answering.” People who need to communicate with you will do what works. If you have “trained” them that you will respond to an email within 5 minutes, then they will feel comfortable using email for emergencies. If however, they email you about something important and you don’t respond, they will typically try reaching you some other way and the way that works, is probably the way they will use next time. So it’s not about wishing and hoping that everyone else will do things differently, but rather about setting up the circumstances so that your own productivity is supported rather than sabotaged.
But for the record, if you have a handheld advice, AND you have the self-discipline not to get sucked in, I think skimming your messages on your handheld device several times a day, including first thing in the morning, is certainly a valid option (I do it myself). Just be careful, because there might be nothing to stop you from scanning on your phone, and then rushing off to your computer to “just respond to this one…” And then it’s all downhill from there!
Thanks so much to Lorie, for her great advice, and for providing the opportunity for a nuanced discussion of a common productivity technique! She knows I’m a fan. =)
Researcher Interview #1 Part 5 (Conclusion)
Click to Listen (6 1/2 minutes)
MT: This is Maura Thomas from RegainYourTime.com. Thanks for listening to the fifth and final part of my interview with Dr. John Dovidio, psychology professor at Yale University. You can see the previous posts by clicking the link at the top of this page and prior pages. And if you’re interested in reading up on the current research, please visit the “Research and Resources” page of this website.
What do you think about the danger that ah…I’ve read some…some research is suggesting that there is a real benefit in the…the quiet moments that we used to have, the time in between things…waiting in line, or even sitting at a red light, or…you know, just the moments in between other things that we…we used to have an opportunity for our mind to just wander and that time was…our brains sometimes used to process what we had heard, and to create connections among things and really where the learning happens. And now there is some fear that we don’t have those moments of quiet anymore because in every moment of stillness, we whip out our iPhone and check our email, or check our Facebook status, or jump on the internet, or play a game on our phone. And now that we have all this…this stimulation in our pocket, do you think that there’s a danger to losing those moments of..of “mind wandering” that we used to have?
JD: There is a lot of evidence that suggests that ah…part of learning is taking the time to consolidate, to reflect upon things, to make sure that what we know just has to reverberate enough in our head for it to stay there. That’s a simple way of saying it. There’s a lot of work that also shows that there are these times that we develop insights by ah…this kind of…not actively thinking about something, but different pieces, or different elements to the solution of a problem just appear to us through insight, and not in a logical fashion. And this insight comes usually during those periods following a period of consolidation and reflection, where you basically have to see, you have to sort of become inwardly focused to start thinking about the thoughts, and then those thoughts can become, can come to coalesce in some unique, synthetic way that becomes a creative insight. And if we’re always focused outward, we’re not going to do as much of that…we’re going to rely on creativity coming from the outside rather than from the inside. On the other hand, to give you the balance of it, is that the other thing about humans is that when we begin to feel we’ve reached a limit, we almost reflexively back off to gain at least enough solitude to be able to regroup, consolidate, and move forward. So the question becomes, not that we’re not going to have those moments of solitude, we just may have fewer and fewer of them as we go on. But if people need time to think, it’s not like we can’t turn off the machines. It’s not that we don’t go into a shower, where we don’t have our, our cell phone on and our computer on. Maybe when we start losing those private moments we’re in more trouble (laughing). But people will probably structure their day so that they’ll have those private moments at different times.
MT: Do you think that we’ll continue to recognize that we need those moments, and take them? I have people tell me all the time that their best ideas come to them in the shower, just for the exact reason that you just said. And one client even told me that he…he got some crayons…water soluble crayons, so he could write on the shower tiles because that’s when he has his best ideas and that’s what I told him, it’s because it’s the only time that you’re not interrupted. So..but…but that was a surprise to him. You know when I said that, he hadn’t thought about it. “Wow, you’re right,” he said. “Those are the only moments of quiet that I ever get.” So to me that..that raises a concern that…especially children who are constantly exposed to all the stimulation…while they may be capable of…of stepping back and taking those moments, they might not recognize that they need them.
JD: Yeah, I mean that’s…the biggest problem is with kids. I mean part of…of growing up has to do with seeking new stimulations and new information. And so kids tend not to be as reflective anyway. They…they tend not to…even if you give them that free time, doesn’t mean that they’re doing it…using the same kind of consolidation that an adult would…the way an adult would handle that. If in fact you…you don’t even allow them that time, then they’re going to be less likely to be able to do that when they become adults because they won’t know what to do with it. And so I think…again, the issue is probably…it’s not having all the media available. It has to do with things like, training people when to use it, when not to use it, having, you know…I think as adults enforcing a quiet time, a non-electronic time, is not a bad thing. Kids will resent it. Part of what we need to teach kids anyway is a little bit of self-control. “You can’t do what you want, when you want, all the time.” But part of being a kid is wanting to do what you want, whenever you want, as soon as you want.
MT: Right.
JD: So, I mean that’s the age-old challenge we have and now it’s just, the electronic media, which is more seductive, just makes it a little bit more complicated and much more difficult to do.
MT: Hmmm, great point. Well I want to be respectful of your time so while I feel like I could discuss this with you forever I will…I will call it here and say thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me. Dr. John Dovidio from Yale University, thank you very much.
JD: Well thank you!
MT: And thank you, for visiting, and be sure to check this space again for future interviews with researchers in the fields of attention, multitasking, productivity, and technology. This is Maura Thomas with RegainYourTime.com.
Researcher Interview #1 Part 4
Click to Listen (4 1/2 minutes)
MT: This is Maura Thomas from RegainYourTime.com. Thanks for coming back to hear part four of my interview with Dr. John Dovidio, psychology professor at Yale University. You can see the previous posts by clicking the link at the top of this page and prior pages.
…That’s actually a really great perspective. I talk to a lot of people often who are becoming a little bit overwhelmed with the idea that, you know, “there is just too much and I can’t catch up.” And I…I run into people every day who are deciding, in fact they even put it in these terms, “I’m trying to decide what my limit is. And…you know, ok I did email, and now I’ve done Facebook, but I’m not going to do Twitter! That’s just where I’m drawing the line, and anything else that comes out, I’m just all done.” (laughing)
JD: (laughing) Mmm hmmm.
MT: So…and there certainly is an age component to this. But it’s…it’s really interesting to hear you say…talk about how humans have overcome this throughout history and…and…how we’re actually really good at it, and perhaps people should…take heart in that…in that idea.
JD: Oh yeah, I’m mean, we’ve…we’ve overcome worse!
MT: Sure. Sure.
JD: (laughing) We could overcome quite a bit!
MT: (laughing) Right.
JD: But I do…you know, at the same time, I think you’re also right by saying…and the people you quoted are right by saying, you’ve got to be cautious, realizing that whatever benefits might…benefits might be coming with the software and hardware development that we see in communication, we have to always understand that there is probably something that’s going to be lost because we just have a limited amount of time, we have a limited capacity for attention, …we have a limited capacity for being able to think and make decisions. Those are the bounds of being human, just like any other animal. And so how do we actually teach people to use a lot of these media in a way that works to their benefit so that they don’t become overwhelmed or develop those habits so strongly that they’re hard to reverse.
You won’t remember this, and I really don’t remember it personally, but when television came in, you know, that changed everything, right? People said, “well television is taking away from human relations. People are no longer talking to one another, they are no longer looking face-to-face, what they’re doing is they’re sitting side-by-side, and the quality of their relationships is going to go down, and tv is going to be the end of everything because people are going to become sedentary, they’re going to become passive, they’re going to need more stimulation. And they’re going to lose sight between what’s real and what’s everyday life.” And to some extent that was true, but then people adjust to it and now we look at tv and we see that as “how…how benign and passive.”
MT: That was part four of my interview with Dr. John Dovidio, psychology professor at Yale University. I hope you’ll come back tomorrow for the fifth and final portion of the interview where I’ll ask Dr. Dovidio about the value of reflection and quiet moments. Also, if you’re interested in reading up on the current research, please visit the Research and Resources page of this website. This is Maura Thomas from RegainYourTime.com. Thanks for visiting!
(Click here for the conclusion of the interview.)
Incorporate Change in 3 Easy Steps (Part 2)
Yesterday’s post discussed how hard it is to incorporate change in your life and the first step that might make it easier: awareness.
Educating yourself is the second step in changing your behavior. It’s hard to change habits when you don’t know how or what to change them to. Let’s say you’ve become aware that you spend too much time in your email, and you know it’s having a detrimental affect on how much you get done every day. But what choice do you have? It seems like you get an endless amount of email and if you aren’t checking it all the time, it will just pile up on you, right? Well, regardless of what you are contemplating, there are typically many people who have done it successfully before you. That’s one of the positive things about the internet: the abundance of information available for you to learn from. Find a book, or an article, or a blog (like this one! =), or an entire website, about someone who has learned how to successfully stay on top of email, while continuing to get things done and be productive. (Incidentally, besides this blog, another great place for advice and more resources about email management is Merlin Mann’s work at 43 Folders: Inbox Zero). Maybe you need more help than just reading, but those resources are available to choose and learn from as well. Another idea that works really well for me is to ask people. I typically get a wealth of information when I simply say to my friends and acquaintances during conversation, “you know, I’m trying to get better at XXX. Do you know of any resources to help me do that?” People LOVE to be helpful and look smart. If you don’t often do this, I think you’ll be surprised at the results.
So, if you’re trying to incorporate change in your life, the first step is to become aware of the habits you have that aren’t serving you. Next, educate yourself about NEW habits that might help, learning from people who have mastered the skill you are trying to acquire. Tomorrow I’ll post the third and final step: dealing with your own psychology.
Thanks for reading!
Incorporate Change in 3 Easy Steps (Part 1)
We all know that changing our behaviors is hard. Knowing we should exercise isn’t enough to get us into the gym or out on the Trail every day. It’s why most New Year’s Resolutions don’t last beyond January. But there are three components to changing behaviors, and considering these might make it much easier for you to incorporate those new things into your life.
Whether it’s “going green,” improved productivity, or incorporating a new initiative, like volunteering, into your life, if you consider the following three steps, you can do these, or most anything else, much easier.
The first component is awareness. Most of our habits are so ingrained in our lives and behavior that we don’t even recognize them anymore. Becoming aware of the behaviors that aren’t serving you is the first step in changing them. For example, if you want to incorporate more environmentally friendly habits into your lifestyle, it’s important to understand what you’re doing that doesn’t serve that desire. Do you leave the water running when you brush your teeth? Do you participate in your city’s recycling program? Do you buy recycled products? Try to think about areas where you could improve, perhaps even make a list. Then the next time an opportunity presents itself, you’ll be more likely to remember that you want to change the behavior instead of just being on “autopilot” as you move through your day.
Do you pay attention to how you work every day? Do you know how often you check your email in a day? The answer might surprise you. Do you have a process for managing your workload, or do you just respond to whatever calls your attention all day? Give some thought to your existing behaviors. Once you are aware of what you want to change, to the extent that you can articulate them to someone else, you’ll then become aware of opportunities to change them. What you measure is what gets improved. So what are YOU measuring?
Tomorrow I’ll post step 2, Education . Thanks for reading!
Do You Need a CRM?
I was at a meeting recently and my table-mates started a discussion about contact management solutions. I hear this often. People need a tool to manage their contacts, so they begin to consider ACT or other CRM software. The bigger question that people don’t consider is that of a productivity management solution, of which contacts is just one part. People try to solve the problem of contact management with a complex CRM solution, when they don’t even have a good system for calendaring, email, or to-do lists.
If you are considering a contact management solution, I suggest that you look at it within the context of your overall productivity, and to me this includes 5 things: calendar, projects/tasks (to-do list), contacts, notes, and email. For more on this, read this post.
I often recommend Microsoft Outlook for PC users. This is not because I am a fan of Microsoft. I am not. But the reality is that Outlook is powerful, virtually free (practically everyone has MS Office already, of which Outlook is a part), not particularly complicated, and syncs well with most handheld devices. However, one problem with Outlook is that some of the “advanced” features are not obvious, and many people miss them. This is especially true with the “contacts” section of Outlook. And I am not referring to Microsoft’s new Business Contact Manager. BCM comes with Outlook 2007 but you don’t have to install it. I suggest you don’t. I find it unstable and unnecessarily complicated, and there is very little that you couldn’t already do with contacts.
Most people don’t realize they already have what they need in Outlook. This was certainly the case with my table-mates at the meeting I mentioned. So this situation inspired me to create a short video on some of the features of Outlook Contacts that you may not have known were available to you. It’s below. I hope you find it helpful. Thanks for reading!
3 Tips to Beat Procrastination & Get Important Stuff Done
I saw this in my Tweet stream this morning:
and I had way more than 140 characters to say about it, so I was inspired to write a blog post about it today. Thanks @alexismadrigal, I hope this helps!
First, I suggest very selective and short-term time-blocking. YOU are the first person you’ll cancel an appointment with, so sometimes time-blocking can be tricky. But there are three rules that help make it more effective:
- Don’t block your time too far in the future, because it’s too uncertain. To get important things done, block time on your calendar today, or tomorrow, but go too far in advance and your priorities will change. and you’ll end up breaking those appointments with yourself. One exception to this: if you have an important deadline in the future, it’s helpful to block some time a day or so before that deadline in order to finish up the project, add final thoughts, or give it one last once-over (or actually do it, if you’re a deadline junkie!)
- Use time-blocking very selectively – only for very important things, and only once in a while. If you try to do it too often, it will just get in the way, and become routine. You’ll start breaking those appointments with yourself, and then you’ll have lost the effectiveness of the technique.
- Don’t make your time-blocks too long. It’s very difficult to block out a whole day, for example. Focus waxes and wanes, things like hunger cause distractions, the desire to “check on things” (voicemail, email, Twitter stream, etc) become too tempting. I find time-blocking works best in 2-hour chunks or less.
Ok, next tip. Even if you haven’t time-blocked, when you decide you are going to spend some time on an important task, ELIMINATE any possible distractions! This seems like a no-brainer but I’m always surprised at how uncommon it is. Close your email client, shut off any Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn (etc) notifications, silence your ringer, shut off the television, etc. If you need noise, play instrumental or classical music. Song lyrics tend to send our brain off in distracting directions, as does the tendency to sing along. Another option: white noise. Turn on a quiet fan, or go outside to the sounds of nature. Small personal rewards can help motivate you as well: If I spend 30 minutes on this, I’ll allow myself 10 minutes of a video game, or blog surfing, or a grande mocha latte, or whatever appeals to you.
One last tip…if you have something important to get done, but you just can’t seem to get your head in the game, grab a piece of paper and a pen and try “stream of consciousness” writing. This helps to eliminate mental clutter and uncover those intellectual gems you know are in there somewhere. Don’t censor yourself, and don’t try to organize as you write. Just write whatever comes to you, and chances are before too long your brain will find its way back to that important thing you’re trying to get done. Or the worst case is you’ll end up with some other pearl of wisdom or great idea. Our brains are much better at creative, strategic thinking and problem solving than they are at remembering details, and if we clear our mind of the minutiae (mental clutter), the “good stuff” often appears.
I hope you found this helpful!
Mastering Control Over Email & Twitter, Step 4
A couple of days ago I promised you 4 steps to conquering your email. In the last few days, I’ve written about 3: learning to controlling the information using a process, learning to control the technology, and learning to control your behavior. They are easy in the sense that they are not complicated or difficult to execute. But probably the hard part is going to be in changing your behavior. That’s never easy. But I promise you that it will introduce some peace and serenity into your life if you’re not constantly multi-tasking.
The 4th step is about easily sorting the important from the unimportant. So of course you need a good spam filter. If you are getting more than a few spam messages a day, you should look for another solution. The technology has advanced and it’s worth spending some time on. But in messages that aren’t spam, one of the easiest ways to sort the important from the unimportant is that probably the information that comes from a real human (friend, family, co-worker) is probably more important than “robo-messages” (coupons, newsletters, notifications, marketing messages). Is that a fair statement?
Well some people use “rules” in their email client so that some messages automatically go into a certain folder. This is one way to handle it, but personally I don’t like it. It’s bad enough to see how many unread messages are in my inbox, if I had those high numbers in other mailboxes too it would stress me out. Plus it wouldn’t be as efficient if I had to click around through a bunch of folders to see what needed my attention. Also the concern there is that I never get around to looking at some of those folders, so my number of emails grows and grows, both stressing me out and perhaps causing problems with my email client.
There is now a much better solution to “robo-mails” and I think it’s the biggest time saver I have seen in a long time. It’s called Otherinbox and if you haven’t gotten yourself an account yet, I suggest you visit now and get one “tout de suite.”
Tomorrow will be one more post on this topic, where I will expand a little bit about a topic I get a lot of questions about: filing your email messages…
Mastering Control Over Email & Twitter, Step 2
Yesterday was step 1: mastering control over the information. Next, you need to learn to master control over the technology it comes in on. Having your email client always open, with messages automatically downloading and giving you an indicator, means that your email is controlling YOU. Same is true for your Twitter client, and your browser windows with Facebook & LinkedIn pages up. Here are a few steps that integrate a process for controlling information and for controlling technology:
- For email, turn OFF the automatic download, so that messages only come in when YOU click send/receive (puts the control back in your hands, rather than keeping you at the mercy of constantly flowing email messages).
- Set aside time to click that send/receive button only 2-3 times per day, allowing yourself at least one full minute (or until you’re done, whichever comes first) for each message.
- Be sure that in that minute, you have moved the message out of your inbox (delete it, file it, or move it to your to-do list). Your email tool should allow you to easily convert emails to tasks. If you don’t have a good system for your to-do list, consider reading my earlier post Are Your Productivity Tools Complicating Your Life.
- Take the same approach with your Twitter feeds and your other social media tools. Yes, Twitter is like a constant “great” party, but sometimes you have to be ok with missing the party to stay home, if you catch my drift. Put another way (from @cjromb): think of Twitter like a river, jump into the flow every now and then, but accept that you can’t touch every drop of water.
I know that you are thinking, “I can’t possibly do that!” It’s a common response, so let’s talk about what’s going on when you aren’t doing this…
If you are constantly checking your emails, (not to mention your Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter Feeds), what you are forcing yourself to do, is to constantly multi-task. Tomorrow I’ll continue the post where we’ll address whether multi-tasking good or bad, and later I’ll discuss the other two steps for mastering control over email and Twitter.
Mastering Control Over Email & Twitter, Step 1
The secret to personal productivity is mastering control. You need control over the information you receive on a daily basis, control over the tools that bring you that information, and control over your own behavior. If you can master control over these three things, you will be the most productive, and the most relaxed, all the time.
The biggest thing I hear people struggling with lately is communication. There are so many ways to receive information now that it’s having a real impact on how people think about their personal productivity. So to learn how to control communication, you need a good process. And by process I mean a real, step-by-step, I-could-explain-it-to-you-if-you-asked, methodology. Taking email, for example: most people’s “process” for managing email is “skim, then skip to the next one.” Does that sound familiar? You need to figure out why it is you are skipping over messages: it’s probably either that:
- you don’t know the answer
- you don’t feel like dealing with it now
- you think it will take too long
- you are looking for “just the important ones.”
So I suggest that the first component in your process be that you set aside time, every single day, to actually “process” your email messages. All of your messages, not just the important ones. During processing, start by allowing yourself at least one whole minute for each message. If you can read it in 10 seconds, and then would normally skip to the next one, allow yourself those extra 50 seconds and I’ll bet you’ll figure out what to do with it (and don’t leave it in your inbox!) The “stopping to think” is the biggest barrier to get over. You won’t actually need a whole minute for each of them, and you may need more than a minute for others. This can help to protect you from the urge to check your email when you don’t really have time. The same is true for your Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. Set aside time each day (how often and for how long is up to you, but I suggest that it should be LESS than you originally think, and you should decide how long you’re going to spend before you log in. Set a timer if necessary.)
So those are just a few things to think about to get you on the road to an actual process for dealing with information, so that you can master control over it. Tomorrow, we’ll talk about step 2: mastering control over the technology. If you have comments or ideas you’d like to share, I welcome them.