Curing email addiction

Do you look for new email every 10 minutes during the day? Check your email as soon as you get home from work? Read new mail during television ad breaks?

According to a recent flyingsolo.com.au blog post, these are a few of the signs you could be an email addict.

But before you start looking for the nearest branch of Emailaholics Anonymous, the post suggests it is possible to break your addiction by changing a few habits.

One of the best tips offered is to only have your email program open for uninterrupted blocks of the day rather than allowing yourself to be constantly distracted by the new mail icon.

B-net's Team Taskmaster blog offers a 'two computer' approach that puts email even further out of sight and out of mind.

It's suggested you turn off your desktop PC's email program and do most of your thinking work at your desk on that computer.

To keep your email handy (but not too handy), the post advises professionals to sit their laptop on the other side of the office with its email program fired up and ready for allocated email periods.

Worth a try, or more trouble than it's worth?

Comments

[David Hinde]

I read an interesting article in the UK Press last month (could have been in the Work Supplement of the Guardian) which tried to quantify lost productivity of frequent email checkers. Most people only allow for the time spent checking - sometimes only a minute or so - but the article showed that there is always a spin up time after checking the emails to get you back on track with your work. Adding this in - some people were losing several hours a week

[adolescent addiction treatment]

I have a friend which is an email addict, she always check her email frequently. minutes by minutes she do that weird thing.

-mj-

[Haven]

I like to read articles, which are really interesting and informative, and this is exactly about your article. In the past I didn't like to read that much and prefered http://www.pdfqueen.com download and read books from the Internet, but several times I came across worthy articles, and am not that categorical ever since :)