Do you know that Outlook (and every other email provider) is defaulted to notify you every 5 minutes at minimum?  If you get email every 5 minutes during your 8 hour day, that’s almost 100 interruptions a day.  How the heck can you get anything done at work if you’re constantly interrupted?!

You have important things you need to get done at work.  But every time you start to get into your “flow,” you see that email alert  and you lose your focus.  15 min later you got your groove back and the email ding drug hooks you again.  You have to get this item for your boss done now or you’ll be working tonight and missing out on your kids’ lives – once again!  And this cycle goes on and on perpetually and you wonder how you’ll make survive.

You’re amazing but you’re not setting yourself up for success

I can help guide you.

Over the course of a year, while getting my graduate degree, working a corporate job and raising twins, I became the most organized person my friends knew.  All I did was implement a new itty bitty productivity technique per week.  It didn’t feel like I changed that much.  But each change compounded and my change investment grew with interest.  And I graduate the top 1% in my graduate degree.

Email is the biggest focus destroyer

So let’s start to squash this with a baby step you can implement to make an impact in your quest to be more focused, more productive and to get your work life (and really your home life) back.

Here’s the plan…

Turn off your email.  Huh?!

I love you so I need to be honest with you.

I get annoyed when someone sends me an email and then IM’s me 5 min later to ask, “Did you see my email?”  I’m like, “No, I’m trying to focus on something really important – and I’d like to get home on time for once.”  Of course, I say that latter part with my inside voice.

This was one of my favorite techniques I implemented.  Most email services are defaulted to check for email every 1-5 min.  Did you know that studies show it takes our brains about 15 min to refocus on the next task after managing email.  No wonder we can’t get stuff done when we have an email program that’s equivalent to trying to have an adult conversation with a 5-year-old in the room.  If you have (or had) a 5-year-old, you know what I mean – you can’t talk for longer than a few min without interruptions or to breakup an argument with another sibling.  It totally disrupts the flow of a juicy adult-to-adult catch up.

I digress.  Outlook is defaulted to check for email every 5 min.  If you get email all day long at 5 min intervals, that’s 100 interruptions in an 8-hour day.  What was Microsoft thinking?  Change your email settings under Options > Mail.  Change it to 60 min.  That will reduce interruptions from 100 to 8.

Voila, you can have the focus and as a bonus the creative part of your brain back too!

BTW – if you’re company blocks you from changing your email settings, the workaround is to enable/disable the Send/Receive > Work Offline mode.  I have to do this at my job.  I’ve “matured” to the point where I only turn on my Outlook twice a day to process email in batches.

So I could have given you 2, 3 or even 10 baby steps.  I know it’s not sexy to advertise small change but it’s what I believe really makes change stick.  And I know that you would have been overwhelmed only to end up giving you the curse of knowledge that typically paralyzes you.

You got this

So take the next step and stop the email “look at me, look at me” drug.  Get your focus and your work life and life at home back.