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The research on this is pretty conclusive. It’s common knowledge now: humans suck at multitasking. We can’t do it. Ever try to send an email while talking or listening on the phone? While you’re writing that gem of an email, you’re ignoring the conversation. Instead of doing one thing well, you end up doing two things half-assed.
Communication is now seamlessly accessible. Traveling by plane was the one time you could be sure to ignore everything, including the Internet. Now even that security hold has been breached. There are so many communication technologies, they’ve become more burden than benefit, but if any one thing should receive the lion’s share of blame, it’s email.
Several tricksters have devised methods of quelling this beastly problem. Back in 2004, Lawrence Lessig, the well-known Internet attorney, declared email bankruptcy, emptied his inbox and sent a mass email asking those with important unanswered emails to resend. Tim Ferriss of The 4-Hour Work Week suggests an automated response letting people know you only check your email once a day. You could read for hours on 43Folders.com about Inbox Zero software and other techniques for managing the communication overlord…oops…I mean overload.
Mobile phones have only contributed to attention-stealing options and now they’re “smart.” Instead of merely phones, they’re now Internet communicators, portable music players, and oh yeah, if you need to make a call they can do that, too. Best (or worst) of all, they’ll allow your email to follow you. Everywhere you go.
The truth is email suffers from an identity crisis because it’s more snail-mail than instant communication. Email delivery speed creates an illusion where the sender expects a message immediately sent will be immediately read.
In the end, whether you go extremist or not, here’s the most often cited tip: turn-off the recurring, automatic “Get Mail” feature! Resist the urge to manually retrieve your email more than once or twice a day. And make sure that important people know the surest way to reach you is by phone.
If more focus is what you want in life, when in doubt, go lo-fi. Close your email program, turn off all IM-style chats, ignore text messages, Twitters, Facebook updates, and prepare for quiet. When you’d like to dip your attention back into the chaos, it will be there, waiting patiently for your return.
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“In the end, whether you go extremist or not, here’s the most often cited tip: turn-off the recurring, automatic “Get Mail” feature!”
^ Except this doesn’t work in Entourage!!
For real, this is what I do… I keep a countdown timer on my desktop. For 48 minutes I ignore all non-urgent IM, irc, and email communication and I only communicate with others if its relevant for the task at hand. After the timer finishes, I reset it to 12 minutes, and allow myself to check email, irc, hit the bathroom, read a random article from my rss feed, etc. etc.
I only ever void this schedule if the work I’m doing is super critical or if I’m really in the zone and it doesn’t seem like a need to take a short mental breather. By the time 48 minutes is up, I normally do.
Additionally, it’s worth mentioning that I filter my email to try and capture things that really do need my attention. Anything that doesn’t have my name, or one of the DL’s I’m responsible for directly on the TO: line, my email client gives it a low priority and I only check low priority emails at the beginning of the next day (so I can assign things to me in my GTD list for that day). This keeps the signal/noise ratio of the email I check constantly to an acceptable – and also has the side effect of making you resist the urge to peanut gallery on threads you were merely CC’ed on.