Breaking Through the Addiction and Making Email Disappear

Tuning your email use for achievement and tranquility in the social sectors
​I admit it. I am an email addict. I can still remember setting up and using my first email account. I created my brand new Hotmail account at a friend’s house who had dial up internet in the 1990s. The next one was my first college email, incessantly refreshed at the computer lab on a shining pixilated desktop monitor. Then later the thrill of getting a new work email address with a url  that you admire such as .int or .un or .gov. It felt like validation that you can communicate to anyone across the world on behalf of a cause that you believe in. The feeling of potential, influence and ability that this now old technology brings is seductive and enduring.  Refreshing the account over and over again, knowing that new messages are always coming creates perceived risk or reward. 

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Each incoming message requires emotion, consideration and action. Endless grappling with who should and should not be in CC and BCC on your replying message. To engage in or avoid the passive aggressive endless email siege approach? How much of yourself to add into this message instead of hiding behind the standard language of professional templates in the social sector? Then later, checking email anywhere and everywhere with my first Blackberry smartphone. Slipping the device from my pocket and scanning repeatedly even on the weekends when there was no possible emergency.  I could go on. 

Are you also an email addict too? 

As successful social sector enterprisers, we all have been conditioned for email addiction. That’s how most work is centered, organized and distributed. People emailing each other, trying to figure out hard problems and administrative processes with no clear system or approach. And it works up to a saturation point. This ad hoc email heavy approach can work with smaller teams working on isolated issues where isolated feedback can be successful. But the approach breaks down when used exclusively for complex projects, when wielded as a management tool or when it substitutes for direct, virtual or in-person conversation to solve a problem. 

Email also fails us in the social sector when it channels the power relationships within our organization, promoting fear and exclusivity among groups. It fails us when we ourselves use it in the wrong way: 

• When we check it obsessively wanting the pain/gain hit of adrenaline. 
  
• When it becomes a form of productive output, when “responding to emails” is what you did all day. 
  
• When we hide behind it, when a phone call or direct contact could feel harder but be more effective. 
  
• When we use email as a project management tool instead of Trello, Skype, Chat or Slack. 
  

Smart email mindset
In a recent interview, Meico from Mindful Techie talks about taking a strategic look at your priorities, and then working back to align email use toward that vision. 

I love that approach as a first step before you employ and specific tactics. Treat your inbox as sacred territory. Remove low value or less useful information from this hallowed ground.Take a moment as the Mindful Techie Unsubscribe, delete, eliminate the things that are not helping you achieve your life and work goals. 

Smart email tactics in the Social Sectors
Consider email your old school correspondence box, as if these electronic messages were old school letters with pen and ink.  Use this venerable form of communication for the right things in a smart, strategic way. 
Smart email techniques:
Batching - Check your emails at set, planned points throughout the day. Start with four times per day. Once in the mid-morning (after you’ve done your best work during the morning Focus Block - described in Planning your Week). Check again at mid-day, once mid-afternoon and then again at the end of your day.  Turn off all alerts and close your browser windows when you are not checking. Slowly train your team (reports and bosses) to know that you are working in deep focus blocks throughout the day. They should not expect you to be riding your email inbox and responding immediately to messages. Try moving to three check-in times per day, then to two. What about once per week? This exact sequence will be different for all of us. Mine differs if I’m responding to a humanitarian emergency or working methodically on humanitarian preparedness projects when there is no crisis. Your workflow will determine your ability to focus outside of email, but we can all usually reduce our email addiction. 
Move to Collaboration Tools - Move to Trello, Skype Chat, and Slack for project management. Never use email when you could be using these new tools. Familiarize yourself, then start teaching others. Treat it as an experiment explaining that you can always revert if it doesn’t work in your context. 
Kill the emailed document approach - Use Google Docs, Onedrive or other shared documents tool. Avoid at all costs creating drafts using a word processing program and sharing these via email. I’ve saved months of cumulative work by never losing work, avoiding document version issues, and establishing immediate feedback and comment sharing with these tools. 
Your best work is outside email - We’ll always have email, and it is essential for some things. But remember that your best, deep work happens outside of email.  What will differentiate you as a professional in getting your next job, or creating that breakthrough approach for the communities that you serve, all happens outside of email. So make time for that best work and minimize time on this necessary, but ultimately less impactful space. 
It’s going to feel weird at first
It's going to feel weird at first. Breaking any addiction hurts for a while. But as a result, you will make email disappear as a problem. You will have more time at work and in the evenings and you will feel disconnected, with  more minutes and hours, and less clutter and cognitive load. Your addiction tells you to log back in and refresh. Resist this and turn that focus to something that rejuvenates you (your hobbies, your friends/family) or use that extra time for deep work on something that matters. 
Happy Trails!