Only Check Email When You Have Time to Reply.
You may already know that I am a proponent of batch administrative tasks like email. Unless you have a job where your main job is to stay at the top of your inbox, there are many benefits to setting boundaries when you are viewing your email, when you keep the app closed and notifications are turned off.
(The biggest benefit, of course, is that you can use the time you aren’t checking your email to get the rest of the work done.)
However, even though I have blocked certain times during the day for email processing, I still quickly check my inbox between other projects and tasks. I can keep my email private when I need to write an article; I’m not very good at keeping my email private when I’ve finished my article and have three minutes before I need to join the conference call.
That means – and you know exactly how it goes, because I bet you were there – I end up dialing a call a minute or two later (or on time but distracted) because something is in my inbox caught my attention and pulled me away from what I really had to do.
But this morning, when I processed the batch processing of messages collected during the night at my Feedly , I read an article on Victoria Turk LitHub of digital etiquette and balance work and personal life .
Turk, author of the book Kill Reply All: A Modern Guide to Online Etiquette, From Social Media to Work and Love , offers a simple solution to the email problem as well as the reply and reply problem on all other messaging systems. are responsible for regularly checking:
A key tenet of maintaining mailbox zero is, for example, that you should only check your mailbox when you actually have time to do something with its contents. Extending this to instant messaging so that you only check WhatsApp or iMessage when you have the opportunity to respond can help avoid the terrible sin of digital etiquette of leaving a friend “to read”. It can also relieve your guilt.
Only check email when you have time to respond. This variation of the “batch check” idea – if you can stick with it – is a great way to help you prioritize both non-mailbox work and different mailboxes.
Plus, it works equally well for messaging, social media, and more.
I’ll quickly move on to the obvious exceptions to this rule: some of us need to be prepared to respond quickly to a message from a leader, family member, or school. There are also situations in which coworkers (or co-parents) may not be able to get ahead of anything until they hear from you, and I don’t think Turk or I suggest that you stay away from your postage. boxes because: most of the day.
But it’s worth asking yourself, before you touch your email or open your social media feed, if you have the time and space to reply to whatever you find there.
And if you really find yourself in a situation where an email or message requires a response that you don’t have time for, Turk offers to send a small note to tell the other party that you saw the message and will reply soon. …
You can then close your inbox and return to work or life, as the case may be.