Margaret Lukens is a professional organizer. Through her company, New Leaf Services (newleafservices.com), she works with busy professionals and creative people, helping them find simplicity, clarity, and room to grow. She brings her experience as a business owner, not-for-profit executive and educator to organizing her clients’ time, paper and projects. She can be reached at 650.342.0580.
Of all the time management strategies I offer my clients, the most controversial is this: never check your email first thing in the morning. “Why?” they may protest. “What if someone has an important request, and they’re waiting for me to do it right away?”Of all the time management strategies I offer my clients, the most controversial is this: never check your email first thing in the morning.
“Why?” they may protest. “What if someone has an important request, and they’re waiting for me to do it right away?”
First, let’s look at your responsibilities. Unless 100 percent of your job requires giving immediate response to others’ requests, you have some multi-step projects to complete, each of which has bottom-line impact for your company. Any project calls for some dedicated time in order to plan and then execute the steps required for completion. Managing a project to completion requires focus.
Now let’s look at what happens when you hit “send and receive.” There’s a note from the travel agent about the hotel in Hong Kong, a request from human resources, something from your professional association, and the paperwork your attorney has forwarded.
Each of these incoming messages is a tempting distraction from the project that requires our focused attention. Even the message from the attorney can probably wait for 60 minutes, enough time to make headway on the projects that are our primary responsibility.
If we begin to work on these email items at 9 am, we often find that we look up at 11:45 and see that it’s too late to begin our project before a lunch meeting, so rather than make progress on the high-priority project, we use our time fragment to accomplish another low-priority task. After lunch we do it again, checking email, reacting to demands, then at 5 we wonder where the day has gone, and note with discouragement that the project is not one step closer to completion.
Instead, make sure you are honestly assessing your most important priorities and tackling them first. Don’t put others into the driver’s seat, letting outside demands determine how you spend your day.
Of course, if your boss is in the habit of emailing instructions which you must act on first thing next day, or your job is to take input from someone else and process it immediately, then perhaps you need to see email first thing. But beware! Email will take the best hours of your day and leave you without time to accomplish important goals.
The modern workplace requires us to juggle many demands simultaneously. We will be better prepared to perform our jobs if we make email serve us as a useful tool rather than rule us as a distraction.