I have probably written about this topic before, so feel free not to read it if you’re sick of it. Lately, I’ve been telling everybody about my new strategy for managing email more effectively. My students have begun to refer to this as an email happy hour! Earlier in my career, when I was even busier than I am now, I always had my email notifications turned on (including interesting sounds – I had a really funny one from Austin Powers). This was back in the day when email notifications were a fairly new and cool feature of email programs. You could actually see exactly when you received an email, allowing you to get back to people with lightning speed. At first, I thought this was a great idea. I would never miss an email or allow my messages to accumulate until I felt like I was drowning in email, because I would simply deal with each message as it came in. I soon began to notice, however, that I would work really hard at my computer for a whole day and then wonder what I actually accomplished. Now, as a professor, it’s often hard to describe my day-to-day activities to others in a way that they can really understand my job. Most people I talk to think that I’m not working if I’m not teaching or preparing to teach. They say things like, “Oh, it must be nice to have the whole summer off?” Right now, teaching is probably less than 20% of my work week, with the majority of time spent coordinating large research projects; writing manuscripts, chapters, and books; supervising students; working at my practice, etc. Even when I do describe this, people don’t seem to know what is meant by “research,” and I believe they have images of me sitting around surrounded by a bunch of books, simply thinking about things. Well, I can say that it was even harder to describe the typical work week of a professor when my activities primarily involved bouncing back and forth from whatever I was working on to the flood of messages that flowed in every few minutes. Sometimes, my wife would ask about my day, and I would say that I just basically answered a lot of email. As you’ve probably gathered, it was also very hard to get anything done. I was exhausted at the end of the workday, and then I had to come home, make a dinner that my son wouldn’t eat (screaming and fussing were involved), and put him to bed. Interestingly, I read a book recently that captured this phenomenon quite nicely – The Organized Mind (if I was more organized, I would remember the name of the author, but if you are interested, just Google it). In this book, the author talks about the problems related to switching back-and-forth between different types of tasks during the workday. Apparently, such switching takes a great toll on our cognitive resources, leaving us feeling depleted and exhausted. An email-based workday (or weekend for that matter), replete with notifications and so on, encourages us to only dip the toes of our attention into whatever it is that we are doing. As a result, we end up with a fairly shallow experience of our work or leisure time. I won’t even get into the problems with texting and text notifications, but they clearly compound this issue. As I grew older and hopefully wiser, I realized that I really wanted to dive full force (and mindfully) into my activities, whether they were work or leisure. As a result, something had to change. Realizing that the ongoing monitoring and tracking of my email was toxic to my productivity and sense of well-being, I decided that I would only check email once per day. Further, I decided I would only check my email in the late afternoon or evening, after I was done all of the rest of my work. In the book I mentioned, the author made an interesting point that even the awareness of an unanswered email can reduce our cognitive functioning by the equivalent of 10 IQ points. Not wanting to pay this price, I decided that it was better for me to be blissfully ignorant of the dozens of emails sitting in my inbox each morning. By the time I check my messages in the afternoon or evening, it is too late to branch off from those messages into further work tasks. I consider this to be another major bonus of my new system. I simply do my best to reply to as many messages as possible, and if some messages spawn tasks that I need to do later on, I just put those on my to-do list. That’s not to say that I haven’t slipped up periodically (email and texting are addictive, activating the same reward areas of the brain that drugs like cocaine and caffeine activate), but I have noticed a much greater sense of peace and well-being throughout the work week and the weekend. Consider the possibility that the mindful use of electronic devices, emailing, and texting, might also make a big difference in your daily life. – Alexander L. Chapman, Ph.D.