The New Habit Challenge: Only Check Email Twice A Day
Join our resident habit expert Rachel Gillett and other Fast Company editors on Friday, October 31 at 11 a.m. ET as we discuss what happened when we ignored our inboxes for most of the day.
By one recent estimate we spend a whopping 650 hours a year
on email, and all this email-checking is stressing us out.
In fact, one researcher at the University of California at
Irving monitored the heart rates of a group of employees while they were
checking email and then again after they took a five-day email break and found
that their stress levels drastically dropped during the break.
Time-management guru Laura Vanderkam tried only checking her
email twice a day as a remedy and loved the results. But would drastically
cutting back on checking our email work for everyone?
For this week's habit challenge, several of us at Fast
Company are putting this idea to the test. Join us for a live chat at 11 a.m.
EST on Friday, October 31 to find out whether that time in between email
allowed us to focus more deeply, or if we got twitchy wondering if we were
missing out on potentially important and urgent messages.
Did you try cutting back your email addiction? Tell us about
your experience in the "make a comment" box below!
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Hi, everyone! I’m Rachel, editorial assistant here at Fast Company and resident habit challenge expert/guinea pig. I’ll be hosting the chat with some other FastCo. editors today, and we’ll be getting started in about 5 minutes, so get your questions ready! Don't forget to brush up on this week's challenge here.
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We’re all set to begin, and I’ll kick things off by introducing our editors who participated in this week’s habit challenge, only checking email twice a day. Welcome Executive Editor Noah Robischon, Leadership Editor Kate Davis, and Copy Editor David Penick. Thanks for participating in today’s chat!
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Hi there, I've just finished checking my email until later today.
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Thanks, Rachel. David Penick here. Looking forward to answering questions.
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Just a reminder, we challenged everyone to drastically cut back on their email this week and see how it would affect our productivity and stress levels.
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Let’s start off by going around and explaining how we each set up our days of less email. I checked my email twice a day around 11 a.m. and 5 p.m.
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I blocked off 10am and 4pm each day for hour-long sessions of conquering my inbox. Although it didn't seem like I'd need a full hour at the beginning of the week, I figured it would be necessary to clear the backlog by the end of the week. I was wrong about this.
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First of all, I cheated every day of this challenge. On my best days I checked email only three times (1st thing in the morning, at lunch, before I left for the day). On those days I did find myself more focused on what I was doing and more than once I actually thought “hmm…things are kind of quiet today” before realizing that it was just because I wasn’t getting constant pings about new messages.
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I checked email at noon and 4 p.m. up until Wednesday, when I finally gave up due to stress levels created by the emails I did receive (from friends).
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I think this is an interesting statistic: by one recent estimate published in the Washington Post we spend 650 hours a year on email, or about 13 hours in an average workweek.
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Do you think that’s a realistic estimate? More importantly, is this a good use of our time?
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As a copy editor, I don't usually receive story pitches so I probably don't receive as many emails as others.
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It feels like I spend 40 hours per week checking email. It's always open, I'm constantly looking.
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I have no idea, I think I'm better at not checking email all the time than most people since I don't have a smartphone
My Life Without A Smartphone
Fast CompanyI've worked in online media for years but I've never owned a smartphone. Here's why I don't feel like I'm missing out. -
Gmail is the first app in the tray at the bottom of my iPhone.
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Email is an essential part of my job, and generally fairly stressful as a result.
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How quickly should I respond to an email? Everything feels like an emergency in email.
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But yeah at work it's always open, every single time a new message pops up I feel like I have to open it even if I don't answer it right away
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I think a huge component of this challenge was dealing with other people’s expectations. Like our Senior Editor Anjali Mullany chimed in earlier this week, these challenges can be very disruptive for our colleagues.
Kate suggested setting up an autoresponder stating you would only be checking email twice a day.
What did you do to manage people’s expectations and do you think it worked? -
I turned off my autoresponder after the first day, because I thought it might seem obnoxious.
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Initially I was going to set up an auto responder to let people know that I wouldn’t be checking email as frequently, but I decided against it because
A) I know a lot of people find auto responders annoying and
B) If the point was that we are addicted to email and that we only assume that people need an immediate response, then the auto responder wouldn’t be necessary. -
I find autoresponders annoying, and especially as a way to communicate something like this. Instead I created a signature at the bottom of every email letting people know that I would be responding more slowly than usual because I was taking part in this habit challenge.
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Other people’s email anxiety became really evident. Emails I was sent got forwarded to other people with the message “I didn’t hear back from Kate, so I don’t know if she’s still there.”
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I don't know, really. No one wrote back saying 'are you crazy?' or anything. I did get a few people asking me how the experiment worked at and expressing how much they wish they could reduce their inbox addiction.
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One neuroscientist from the University of Chicago contends that our perception of isolation is really quite bad for us. It can make us more stressed out, weaker, sicker, fatter, more fatigued during the day . . . the list goes on.
Did you perceive yourself to be more or less isolated this week? And how did that make you feel? -
I work remotely from Austin, so anything I can do to not feel isolated is good for me.
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I felt a little out of the loop sometimes but generally it didn't bother me because what was I really missing? I'd open my inbox to a bunch of PR pitches
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For the first couple of days I honestly felt a bit lonely as a result of not checking email as often. Sad but true: I was pining for my inbox. A sure sign of addiction, I think. One side effect is that I spent more time talking on the phone. Knowing that I would not be able to follow up as quickly as usual via email, I instead told people to call me or that I would call them. Net result: More time talking to humans in real time.
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I feel like things can usually wait a few hours since I'm not in breaking news and since I'm connected to my coworkers on Slack and GChat
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I do think this week would have been a total disaster if not for Slack..in general, I think Slack has been a great GChat and email replacement for us.
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I'm curious to know whether it was overwhelming to go through massive amounts of email at once.
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It's true that this would not have been possible for me without Slack, our internal collaboration and chat tool.
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It was not overwhelming for me. I was more concentrated and less distracted than usual while clearing my inbox. Knowing that I only had this precious hour to respond to all the messages made me really focus. I even got back into my version of the Follow Up, Archive, Hold system that I learned from Gina Trapani.
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I didn't find it overwhelming actually, it was kind of more efficient because I could deal with everything at once instead of pulling me away constantly
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I agree. I feel like it helped me regain more control of my inbox actually.
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Hi Fast Company! :) To cut back my email addiction, I stopped checking my work and personal email after 6:30pm everyday and only check them at 9am the next morning. On weekends, I'm off email completely. It helps if you don't set up email on your phone or put it on Manual Fetch so you don't get alerts.
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And when I return from vacation, I select ALL and hit delete in all my inboxes. If it was an email about something important, it will surely come up again as soon as I'm back in the office or with my friends.
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Chatting live now, at Fast Company headquarters. Join our conversation! -
Some org cultures treat email as IM and expect a prompt response. I'm assuming that's not the case for you all Fast Company?
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To answer Mark's question, I think it depends on who you are working with and the expectations you have set up with them. We are all on Slack and gchat all day and respond quickly there, but unless I'm looking for a story to be filed by a certain time or I'm sending edits back I don't except someone to respond right away, since I don't.
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Let’s talk about productivity.
One study from the University of California at Irving found workers who went without email for five days felt more in control of their working lives.
Did you feel you had a better command of your day?