With two major projects in flight and a third one heating up I’ve been looking for a better way to feel less overwhelmed by the torrent of email–a way to recapture the feeling of peace that comes working late on Saturday night when there are no interruptions. When no new mail messages arrive and nobody is pinging you on instant messenger, and you feel like you’ve accomplished a full day of work in three hours.
I just finished reading a fantastic book called Rework by the founders of 37 Signals (Jason Fried & David Heinemeir Hansson) which led me to the subscribe to their blog. The first entry I read was a musing about how much easier it would be to reduce an inbox that didn’t feel full. This reminded me of my own new technique.
More and more I’m doing a complete off-line sync of my mailbox and only going back on-line to send or compulsively deliberately, check for new messages. It is definitely a simple, nice way to dam everything up for a while, process a chunk of messages, and feel like I’ve gotten somewhere before consciously asking for more.
It’s tempting to stay on-line, observing the torrent of incoming messages or compulsively checking for new ones because, “surely the email that will change the rest of my day or that I must respond to immediately or dire consequences will result” could come at any second.
Honestly ask yourself, “How many times did that happen yesterday or in the past week or month? Was all that vigilance and distraction worth it?” In my situation it rarely, if ever, is though I fully respect your environment may be different.
Image by cole007 via flickr used under a Creative Commons license.
April 12, 2011 at 8:06 pm
I’ve started to use the new Gnome 3 feature of “desktop-wide presence” for that very same reason.
Set your presence to busy in the Gnome-Shell menu with your name on it, and you won’t get any notification anymore. No new email notification, no popup for new incoming IM message, no “useless updates are available for your computer” that will make me go through the list and check each fixed bug one by one,…
But the notifications are still stacked in the messaging tray (which is normally hidden from sight in the bottom-right corner) so that I can deliberately go and see them if I want to.
(Note: “urgent” notifications are still shown, like “battery level is critical”, but those are both rare enough to not bring distraction and important enough that you don’t want to miss them)
With this I don’t need to be completely offline to avoid distractions, and it makes me feel extremely productive every time I turn this on.
April 12, 2011 at 11:00 am
The offline sync to go online only when required to send or, refresh the stockpile is something that I’ve been doing for the past year or so. The immediate benefit that I’ve observed is similar to you – have a nice distraction free time slice to wrap up work before going on to ride the next flood of email.
There are far too many project lists and associated lists that keep pumping mail through the day. Actually, for me they flood the inbox during my evening/night hours (BOS and RDU amongst others become prolific). Which means that my dawn hours are ripe for distractions 😀
The offline aspect coupled with an aggressive imap-filter ruleset tries hard to keep my inbox limited to only those items that require a direct and immediate notice. Of course it sometimes fails when mailing list responses get cc:ed or, I get copied onto responses (as an attention grabber). Otherwise it seems to be working out nice.