One Week of Turning off Email Notifications | Part Two

In part one, I shared that I was going to take the plunge and stick to checking email three times a day – 9AM, 1PM, and 3:30PM. I had some initial hiccups, but I was able to get to a point where I didn’t erroneously check my email despite notifications being turned off. In this post, I will share the results and compare the numbers and my impression of the experience. Most importantly, I will explain if I will continue to keep notifications turned off or if I will be in a mad dash to turn them back on Monday.

Data Speaks

Arguably, the total time spent checking email each week remained unchanged irrespective of the notifications. However, the most interesting graph for me was the breakdown by hour. Checking my email without notifications generally lasted between 14-16 minutes each hour for the week and in the week with email notifications, the checking was more sporadic on an hourly basis and ranged from 5 to 27 minutes! Most of this was probably in part due to reactively checking outlook when I saw an email come in/notification pop-up. The total minute breakdowns by day didn’t seem to yield any conclusive results and I wonder if the nature of my work deliverables, especially the ones where email communication is mission critical, will skew my week-to-week results for this graph.

Anecdotal Thoughts

Erroneously checking email is a hard habit to break. I was especially susceptible to checking email when I wasn’t particularly looking forward to my next task – using email as an excuse to find any reason to further postpone “eating the frog.” However, if I was mid-task, I didn’t have the disadvantage of being interrupted by even the most mundane of emails. Even if there was no action for me with the current email coming in, I would find myself stuck in outlook strategically moving emails around for additional minutes. Even if I was able to pry myself from email quickly, it still took an extra minute to remember where I was.

Did I Turn Notifications Back On?

No – I will be an advocate of turning incoming email notifications off as a way to improve focus on the task at hand. The reality is that my notifications have been off for over a month and I am still trying to break from being reactive to each individual email to dedicating time to emails in an effort to be both pro-active about emails and protective of my productivity time during the workday. The reality is that I am a call or instant message away for people with an emergency to contact me.