Removing My Email Fix

I am an email junkie.  I check my email probably 50 times a day at least, either on my phone or while working at my desk.  To paraphrase an old Chicago lyric “Email, you’re a hard habit to break.”  However, this week I have set about changing my habits.  I did the math on the interruptions around checking email and figured I am probably burning an hour or two each day in focused time by constantly checking mail or having it open on another monitor.

So, as an experiment, I did a couple of things:

• I turned off the automatic email sync on my iPhone (it felt like I was disconnecting oxygen as I did it).  To read email on my phone, I now have to launch the mail app and wait for it to download.  How 1994!
• I put times on my calendar to check email each day.  I check email three times during the work day:  First thing in the morning (to deal with stuff from my team that happened overnight), at or around noon, and then at the end of the day.  There are a few more at night, but I have tried to remain true to the discipline during the normal work day.

It has been really difficult to adjust, I won’t lie.  The glowing red circle on my iPhone was like a beacon calling to me.  ”Scott, someone needs your expertise right now!”  Without it, I have been a bit restless, wondering what I was missing.  It turns out that I am not missing much that can’t wait.

The other difficulty has been the discipline of getting into Gmail and sending mail without reading all of my unread mail at the same time.  I could really use a different Gmail interface that sends mail only, and doesn’t show me my other mail.

I also need to get better at processing my email when I am in there.  I need to be sending stuff that needs attention to Evernote so that I can work on it when I am focused, and not have to get back in to email to download that attachment or whatever.

I am now three days in, and I have to say it’s been kind of nice.  It’s not that I have noticed a 50% uptick in productivity or anything, but I have definitely tamed some of the tyranny of the urgent that I felt was overtaking me.  I have a feeling there will be further modifications as I tune what works and what doesn’t, but I am committed to seeing it through in some form.

I don’t do well with making radical changes to bad habits, but rather by making slow changes and sticking with it.  I imagine most others are the same.

Question:  Have you ever modified your email habits with success?  What has worked for you, and what hasn’t?