Emailing to live, not living to email
Glen Stansberry at LifeDev is reclaiming his life 
by managing email addiction better.
In particular, he is not checking his email first thing in the morning or last thing at night anymore:
I figured that if I wanted to be productive during the day, I’d have to clear out the inbox first. And if I didn’t clear out the inbox at night, I’d be left with even more email to check in the morning. What started out seemingly as a great plan to control my email and become more productive, quickly turned into making my life more cluttered, unscheduled and less productive.
“If you are like me,” Steve Jobs reminded the faithful during last week’s keynote, “you live in Mail”. Glen is finding more life outside Mail by going cold turkey first and last thing:
By not checking your email at night you’ll find that you’ll get more sleep, and you won’t really be missing anything too important anyway. And by not checking your email first thing in the morning, you’ll be more productive throughout the day.
[Via Daring Fireball ]
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August 17th, 2006 at 11:57 pm
The “Zero Inbox” philosophy isn’t an easy one to live by. The first step to any philosophy is to know yourself. If you aren’t going to use it completely (be honest) then there’s no point.
Make sure you have all the tools and tricks required to make it work for you. You don’t have to deal with every email that comes in right away. There’s nothing wrong with having a “Deal with this later” folder.
Personally, I find that at least 50% of the legitimate email I get is ‘FYI’ or ‘CC’ tidbits that I don’t actually have to do anything about but I don’t want to delete right away. Rather than leaving them in my inbox cluttering things up I put them in folders. I have folders for the people who send me these things regularly, and then a generic ‘info’ folder for the others that come in occasionally. And once in a while I go through and delete the stuff that is irelevant.
Personally I find having a huge inbox a big psychological weight on my shoulders. Even if they aren’t all things that need to be dealt with, they feel like it. I know that it’s not the same for everyone - however I do know that a lot of people feel the same way.
You can’t become a slave to email however - any more than you should let yourself become a slave to any ‘electronics’. You need to give yourself time to “DO” things rather than always be reacting to the things that are coming in. Setting the frequency of how often my email client checks for mail down to 10 or 15 minutes gives you time to act on things and get other things done.
August 18th, 2006 at 2:10 am
Those of us with business connections on other continents unfortunately don’t really have the option of not checking e-mail first thing in the morning. What does help, though, is to have a Gmail address for mailing lists and other low-priority stuff and use a conventional POP or IMAP mailbox and a desktop mail client for the more “important” mail.
September 28th, 2006 at 9:30 pm
[...] One solution is to break the connection between action and reward. Like Glen Stansberry and Merlin Mann he recommends reducing the frequency of mail checks. Hard-core fans of the cold turkey school will check mail only twice a day. I would rather cut my heart out with a teaspoon, but it might work for you. Or close Mail.app altogether for six or eight hours. Urrggh. [...]