One Week of Turning off Email Notifications | Part One

Boosting work productivity at a time when the digital distractions are commonplace is no easy task. A quick search of work productivity tricks suggests that turning off email notifications are a great way to reduce distractions and keep my focus on the tasks at hand. For a week in January, I was able to track how much time I actually spent in my email at any given time.

I found that I would do multiple, quick checks of email throughout the day whenever a notification would pop up. My work is such that email communication is used for completing tasks and in order to work on new, urgent tasks. As can be seen by the graph above, my biggest habit was to get into work and within the first hour, check my email for new requests from the previous evening and early morning. From Wednesday to Friday, I was checking my email at least once an hour for 7 out of 8 hours (ignoring lunchtime from 12-1).

I decided to take the plunge – turning off email notifications on my laptop (the pop-ups, the tray icons, and the mail indicator) and my phone (the visual in the home screen, the bubble with the number of unread emails, and the audible “ping” dedicated to new messages). I knew that my biggest struggle would be to not come into work at 8AM and look at email, but if I could manage to not get derailed first thing in the morning, maybe there is something to this no email notification theory.

For three weeks, I have had no notifications for emails. At first, I was surprised that I kept checking my outlook compulsively and without reason – multiple times an hour. It was as if I was paranoid and had FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) over the potential of a missed email! The habit of checking email randomly was so pervasive that I believe that I checked email more than if I had notifications on.

Now that I have finally got to a point where my work day doesn’t completely revolve around constantly checking emails for no reason – I am ready to spend the upcoming week tracking my email usage. My goal is to condense my email checking to three times a day – 9AM, 1PM, and 3:30PM. In part two, I will share my results/conclusions and any tweaks I made to the structure to increase my productivity.

To go to part two, click here.