New Year, New Plan: Put Email on a leash

For the past few days I've been mulling what is the single most important New Year's Resolution I could make to improve my productivity and the hands down winner is putting email on a leash and keeping it there. Email is totally fracked up and totally indispensable. It's a cute puppy one minute, a dawn of the dead productively eating monster the next.

I'm sick and tired of dancing to email's psychotic tune - or the tune of all the spammers, vendor spammers, political spammers and news spammers that have corrupted what used to be a great tool. No more.

So here's my line-in-the-sand, not one step further plan for putting email on a leash and keeping it there:

I will not check email before 9am. Ever. Period. I'm reclaiming my right to decide what I am going to spend my day on from email's manic grasp, and taking back the most valuable part of my day, the part where I get the hardest thing done, set the tone for the day, and get things done that will actually matter to me in the future. Email will have to sit outside my life before 9 am and look in, kind of like Squeaky does.

I will check email four times a day and that's it. 9am, noon, 3pm, end of day. That's enough. Anyone who has a urgent need to get ahold of me sooner than at those times can pick up the phone and call me.

I will aggressively push vendor-spammers to start RSS feeds and stop emailing me. If a tiny good company like castingwords.com can do it, there's absolutely no excuse for me to see another email from the likes of Microsoft, Adobe, or any of the rest.

I will ruthlessly chop all news spammers. I'm unsubscribing to the lot: CNN, Wash Post, NYT, etc. No more. I'll subscribe to their feeds, but they've abused my Inbox's hospitality for the last time.

So that's my plan for getting email on a leash for 2007. What's yours?

Comments

[Bob Walsh]

I take your point, Robert. I'm a morning person: I routinely get up at 4am, sometimes when I need to crank out work, at 3am. (Note: being normal is very overrated! :)) If you are one of the denizens of the dark who come out and do their best work when all the villagers are asleep, apply the same rules shifted for your time.

The bottom line is you can run email or let email run your life. Not both.

[Robert]

Does anytime after midnight count as, "before 9AM"? ;)

[Lisa Peake]

Hi Bob,

Very cool and comprehensive plan here! It reminds me of New Year's diet resolutions- complete with subprojects about how to achieve an end result. One last tip to add- from my own experience it can also be good to set the tone for how many emails you want to get by only responding to emails that need a response, succinctly, clearly, and in a way that communicates the next action. In other words, don't encourage your friends to throw forwards, memes, and irrelevant messages your way. Of course there's always room for a little humor in my inbox, but I find that by limiting how much I put out, people seem to catch on about how much/what kinds of email I want to receive.

Thanks again for sharing!
Lisa

[Scott Carpenter]

Great tips Bob. I agree regarding constantly checking email is a (bad) habit and IMO can be an addiction as well.

I have a rule (or more accurately, my wife prescribed this rule) of no checking email from when I get home until after 9pm. It's still a challenge - but I find I can do this if the laptop is not unpacked when I get home.

As for email management during the day - when things are hectic some of us at the office totally disconnect from all forms of communication for a period of time - no email, no Google Talk, no MSN messenger. It's amazing how focussed you can be be without these distractions!

[Bob Walsh]

Hay Matt -

The bottom line is that endlessly checking email is a) a learned behavior, b) a huge waste of time, c) an addiction or d) all of the above. The people in your workshops - and people in general - need to understand they can be productive or they can jump every time any one of six billion other people zaps their inbox, but not both!

[Matthew Cornell]

Great tips, Bob. I'd love to hear how they go as you practice implementing them. I'm curious because when I talk about these at workshops, I get some serious push-back.

Cheers!