Comments on: Email Productivity Experiment – Update 1

By: Email Productivity Experiment - Update 4 | Getting Things Done GTD with Personal Development and Motivation for Success

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 13:45:09 +0000

[...] you who missed the first four I have provided links to them below. Email Productivity Experiment Email Productivity Experiment – Update 1 Email Productivity Experiment – Update 2 Email Productivity Experiment – Update [...]

By: Email Productivity Experiment - Update 3 | Getting Things Done GTD with Personal Development and Motivation for Success

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 07:50:54 +0000

[...] you who missed the first three I have provided links to them below. Email Productivity Experiment Email Productivity Experiment – Update 1 Email Productivity Experiment – Update [...]

By: Email Productivity Experiment - Update 2 | Did I Get Things Done? - Getting Things Done GTD with Personal Development and Motivation for Success

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 08:42:34 +0000

[...] This is the third post in my mini series about email productivity. For those of you who missed the first two I have provided links to them below. Email Productivity Experiment Email Productivity Experiment – Update 1 [...]

By: Andrew Mason

Andrew Mason — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 12:58:54 +0000

@Rod.

Thanks for the link, good read. Even at 64 seconds, checking email as much as I have been doing represents a problem..

By: Rod Fitzsimmons Frey

Rod Fitzsimmons Frey — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 23:51:02 +0000

According to Thomas Jackson at Loughborough University the average email interruption is 64 seconds: http://hdl.handle.net/2134/489 . But I totally agree it depends on what you’re doing: if you’re programming something of even moderate complexity, it can be like a big card castle in your brain comes tumbling down and needs to be built up again.

For me, a big part of the problem is email triage — that is, I don’t know what the email is about and I’m just plain curious. Good use of email routing can help that a lot by putting newly arrived emails in various topic folders. I find that when I can glance at my email client and see that three new emails went into listserv folders and two more into a jokes folder, I can get back to work without much problem.

By: Witold Rugowski

Witold Rugowski — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 10:56:15 +0000

One thing I have learned regarding productivity and email is to turn that damn mail client down, when I do not write mail.

I try to check mail with some longer breaks, however when I left my Thunderbird open… I do also compulsively check for mail

Ideally I would like to check for mail 4-5 times a day.

From other things – I now tend to turn computer off when I’m not working. It is too much tempting to just check emails

By: Andrew Mason

Andrew Mason — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 19:08:50 +0000

@Katy

I love Growl and use it for most things apart from Mail.app. I turned it off as the notifications were distracting as I get tons of email. I rely on the Dock icon and the nice sound it plays when a mail arrives.

More to follow

By: Katy

Katy — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 17:52:22 +0000

Just out of interest, have you installed Growl for Mail.app which pops up the notifications on screen or do you rely on the dock icon/physically switch to mail.app?

I ask as I find I check mail less if I can quickly see who it’s from and the subject – I know I can afely ignore some emails for a couple of hours.

By: Jared Goralnick

Jared Goralnick — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:30:20 +0000

I agree with the others here, 90 seconds seems a bit low. As experiment number 2 I’d be curious if you’d find that life would go on as normal if you turned off all your notifications.

Turning off notifications was my first crucial step to email sanity.

By: John B. Kendrick

John B. Kendrick — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 12:30:48 +0000

I’d hate to see my email check rate, as I almost always have my email with me on my iPhone, work mail and calendar events are forwarded through our PDA server. Though I don’t often respond right away (your mental checkin is a good analogy) This actually keeps me away from the computer where I would more than likely spend time reading/answering as much as I would otherwise spend. I’ve written about man of my experiences with the iPhone and GTD at http://johnkendrick.wordpress.com