Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how best to manage email. I recently returned from a trip, and as expected, I had many, many emails awaiting my response. Since returning, I have often felt compelled to try to get through all of my email so that I don’t end up drowning or overwhelmed with work. My usual rule is to only check and reply to email approximately twice a day during specified times. This is because one of the features of email is that it generally involves requests, questions, or demands from other people. I have personally found that, if I check my email intermittently throughout the day while I am trying to get work done, it is much more difficult to be mindful of the work that I’m doing. This is probably because all of these requests, questions, demands, and decisions are taking up some of the mental resources but I could be using for the things I really need to get done. This is why I have turned off the feature that notifies me whenever I get a new email. I personally think that is the most horrific feature of email, and when I used to have it on, I felt as if my mind was bouncing around like a pinball much of the time.
In other words, awareness of the emails that I was receiving made it very difficult to be mindful. I’m sure that many other people can probably relate to this problem, whether the culprit is email, tweets, text messaging, or any of a number of other ongoing communication methods. All of these things encourage us to try to multitask, but from what we know about the research, multitasking is simply a myth. It is difficult, if not impossible, to engage in two competing, cognitively demanding activities at once. Instead, what we end up doing is switching from one activity to the other repeatedly. Each time we make a switch, we lose something in terms of our mental efficiency, and thus, we never end up fully doing anything that we are actually doing. Indeed, an ancient Greek philosopher once said that to do two things at once is to do neither.
Think about how this relates not only to your work life, but also to your personal and social life. It may seem old-fashioned for me to say this, but I believe that all of these new methods of rapid communication are changing the very nature of our relationships with one another. Instead of actually speaking to people, hearing each other’s voice-tones, seeing facial expressions, etc., we are often communicating in short bursts, brief sentences, and in text form. Also, we are often doing this while we are engaged in some other activity. As a result, it is very difficult to bring our full attention to the person with whom we are communicating. Instead, we squeeze in little bursts of communication in between other activities we have somehow given higher priority. Try this out as an experiment for the next week or so. Take the time to actually speak with, either in person or on the phone, the people that you care about (or even the people you don’t yet care about, such as someone you might see at the supermarket, coffee shop, and so on). Give them your full, mindful attention. Make them your top priority. Put down your smart phone, avoid your email or texts, and simply be with the person in front of you.
“The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
Alexander L. Chapman, Ph.D., R.Psych., Wednesday, February 26, 2015.