Stop Chasing Mailbox Zero, Practice Attention Management Instead
Cleaning everything in your mailbox is great. You get a sense of accomplishment and your to-do list becomes a little less burdensome. Plus, productivity isn’t measured by the number of emails you reply to. Instead, learn to manage how you spend your attention.
In today’s world, more than ever, attention is the currency. What you pay attention to determines what you spend your productive energy on. By viewing your inbox as a measure of productivity, you are giving your most productive hours to others. To make matters worse, sending emails generates more emails. While communication is great when you need it, email itself is just a tool. As the news site Quartz explains:
Armed with gadgets, we’ve never been better equipped to “make the most of our time.” Our ubiquitous phones allow us to productively fill all our time, chat in real time, and complete multiple tasks while rejecting incoming requests like some supercharged ninja, powerful and efficient. In an effort to make the most of our time, we cut it into ever smaller pieces. This leads to what Brigitte Schulte calls the confetti of time; however, the real impact is not on our time, but on our attention. When we scatter our attention to a thousand micro-actions, we do not allow ourselves to study deeply or think rightly.
Of course, this does not mean that email is evil. If you have a message to reply to, please reply. If you need to send a message because it will help you get the job done, please send this email. However, in addition to essential communication, email can be not only distracting, but also a useful tool. A required skill is learning when to productively pay attention to email and when to ignore.
Time management only makes our busy lives worse | Quartz through 99u