Deprioritizing Email Has Greatly Improved My Work Productivity and Overall Job Satisfaction

For as far back as I can remember in my career the first thing I did everyday upon arriving to work was check and respond to email, it was also the last thing I did before I left each day. It was also the thing I did regularly throughout the day each day of each workweek. Checking and responding to emails has always been at the very top or very near the top of my priority list at work. The portion of my work time I spend checking and responding to emails grew each year, and seemed to neatly mirror my own growth within the business where I worked. As my responsibilities grew so did the size of my inbox. I prided myself at keeping my inbox and unread emails at or near zero and always responding promptly to each and every message no matter how unimportant or trivial. In recent years as the flood of emails reached record levels I devised ever more complicated systems of rules for prioritizing, categorizing, organizing, and storing emails into folders and subfolders, groups, and subgroups. I asked colleagues to explain their even more complicated systems so that I might learn from them and mimic their best ideas. It was an ongoing, uphill, seemingly never ending, battle against an enemy whose numbers were never depleted, and in fact mustered more troops to the field each and every day. I was just one man going toe to toe against this ever growing onslaught of emails and I was determined to never give up, never surrender. All of this effort was undertaken with one overarching goal in mind, maximizing the number of emails I could receive and respond to in the shortest possible amount of time, and always in priority order. Typically that meant that priority was assigned based on the senders rank within the particular business within which I worked, with those higher up the chain being prioritized above those below. Special deference would always be given to my direct manager, who's emails (almost) always took priority over anything else from anyone in the organization, including my own direct reports. Failing to respond within hours was shameful, failing to respond in the same day an unmitigated disaster, not responding at all, well, let's just say some things were downright unthinkable.

The system seemed to have served me well as I found my career blossoming. You may have experienced something similar in your own career, or maybe are currently experiencing it. However, at some point, I can't say exactly when, I began to question the wisdom of what I was doing. Reflecting on it now I think the primary initial driver was the recognition that it was becoming harder and harder to explain to people what I did for a living. I was, still am, a research scientist (my official title currently is Director of Science), but it became harder and harder to answer that way with a straight face. After all, what does a research scientist do? They do research, they do not spend all day, everyday, checking and responding to emails. My job is not primarily, or even secondarily, or even tertiarily supposed to be about checking and responding to emails. My job is to do research and/or to supervise and organize others doing research. To generate hypotheses, design experiments, run experiments, analyze data, draw conclusions and generate new hypotheses based on the results of those experiments etc. and so on and naseum until such time as the problem at hand is solved (its never really solved) and we can move on to the next problem (or iteration of the first). Now of course as a more senior research scientist I do rely on others to handle many parts of the above process, but even that does not require countless, non stop all day everyday email checking to co-ordinate.

I never actually made an official decision in my own head to change things, but as the above realization slowly dawned I me I gradually, almost imperceptibly at first, began to deprioritize email and reprioritize the tasks and activities that were (in theory at least) more central to my job function. Eventually, over the course of about six months or so I arrived where I am at today. Email is now one of the last things I think about when I sit down at my desk in the morning and I only check it two or three times a day, including one quick scan before I quit for the day. Of course, I never really quit. I work 24/7, 365 days a year, but I think you know what I mean. I never spend more than one hour each day, and most days much less than that reading and responding to emails. And yes, predictably the number of unread messages in my inbox has exploded, currently sitting just north of 2000 or so, but guess what, I have yet to miss anything of any real importance. Nobody has noticed anything different from me, or if they have they have not said anything, but that I seem happier and more energized than ever about my work. So far this little experiment feels like all upside and almost no downside but for one minor little nagging detail. Why do I feel so guilty about the whole thing? No matter how well things have managed to turn out, I continually question the wisdom of the decision and keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. It feels like I am cheating somehow, or missing something. I can't put my finger on exactly why but the feeling is there and it is real, and it is strong. Maybe it's just the habit of all those years whispering in my ears, trying to convince me the error of my deprioritized email ways. Maybe.