🕒 A case for procrastinating on email
I saw this, around lunch time, one Wednesday.
https://twitter.com/andypiper/status/1222478036047745024?s=09
Starting my day with email
I learned, at my first full-time job, that very busy people are waiting on things from me. Here I am, a new grad, fresh out of school. And all these professionals are delayed in doing their important work. Why? Because their requests are languishing in my inbox.
But it was in university, when I first saw evidence of email response expectations. Group work team mates would sometimes complain about a person being a bottleneck because they had not responded to an email sent in the past hour.
I'll be damned if I became a bottleneck! I worked hard to stay on top of my email 💪🏽
There was, then, a constant pressure to respond to email quickly. There still is, now. Checking email feels like the smart place to start the day. It feels like a backlog. And I can't have a backlog. Clear the backlog, then I can get started with real work!
At first, the amount of email is not much of a burden. 📬
But I work in a knowledge economy. After a few years in this knowledge economy I, as a somewhat productive and semi-informed wage earner, have amassed countless contacts, subscriptions, and newsletters. With a daily backlog of email as proof of my success! 📬📬📬
"Put it off!", says my lizard brain.
And I, having learned to distrust impulses, think it a bad idea.
"Do it later!", says my rational brain.
Now I'm thinking I may have my wires crossed.
"There was a day when I looked up and realized, I had become someone who professionally replied to email, and who wrote as a hobby."
Neil Gaiman said that in a speech to uni graduates in 2012.
My LinkedIn headline is not Expert Email Writer. Responding to and writing new emails is a skill. It's not the job. It lets me achieve my goal, which should be something else entirely.
I don't like feeling that email was the achievement of the day. So, I'll take a page out of Neil's book.
Doing email after doing actual work
"I started answering fewer emails, and was relieved to find I was writing much more."
I pushed my window to do email into the afternoon. I now spend my mornings writing, coding, and creating in any form. In the afternoon, when I process my email, it helps me build out the following day.
Afternoons are for planning and arranging.
In a later newsletter, I'll talk about filtering email so that the inbox I check every day isn't full of literally everything. Some of the emails in there could wait till the weekend, or some other time to be done. And I can have separate inboxes for those, so I don't have to see them, until I need to see them.
And check out a previous post about using Snooze to make old email boomerang back to you at the right time!
Thanks for reading all the way through! Let me know what you think, by replying to the email. Otherwise (at)me on Twitter or Mastodon.