Yep, that’s what happened.
I’ve gone through a variety of email checking routines over the past few years, ever since I first realized in 2017 that I was checking email too frequently and it was causing me to get distracted during the day. Even worse was that for me, email (also: texting, social media, Google News feed, etc.) was causing me to feel dependent, so that during the day I’d reach for my phone when I was feeling bored or down hoping for a quick pick-me-up.
Long story short, that way of using my phone sucks, and I really don’t like it.
Recently I also I wrote about my new text-message-free morning routine, where I physically close my eyes when I shut off my phone alarm in the morning to avoid seeing text notifications that could throw off my entire day. This routine has been going quite well: I spend the first hour or so of my morning focusing on getting ready with a clear head, and only then do I check the texts from the night before.
Email, though, has been a different story. In Japan I originally developed a routine of checking my email right before I leave for my Day Job (the timeslot I now devote to checking texts). I’d check whether anything important had come in, then stay away from email until the end of the day. This helped to both keep me away from email, and calm my worrying mind from fretting about whether anything important had come in.
My more recent system has been less rigid: find a set time during the day to check email, log on, then log off as quickly as possible. No frills, no schedules, just handle each day as it comes.
Until the day I screwed up.
What Happened
OK, so it’s not super-dramatic—the other day I had some extra time in the morning before leaving for my Day Job, and I also knew I had a busy Day Job day ahead of me. In a Classic Ian move, I figured I was playing it real smart: check my email in the morning, and then if anything important came in, I’d be mentally prepared to handle it in the evening after my busy Day Job day.
Whelp, lo and behold, nothing important or urgent came in that morning, but some other messages sure did. One of them had some Not So Good News about a project I was working on. Nothing devastating, but definitely not what I was hoping for with this particular project (which is still a secret for now!).
The thing was, though, right after that I opened another Non-Urgent email reply that had some Mediocre News in it—better than the Not So Good News, but still less good than I was hoping for. So I felt disappointed.
Then I realized that someone I’d been hoping to hear back from Hadn’t Responded Yet, so in the wake of these other two emails, this got me down more than it should have.
Then I left for my Day Job still thinking about the morning’s disappointments…which I then carried into a pretty busy, pretty important day where I was distracted, low-energy, and having trouble dealing with challenges as they came up.
In short: I had a rough day because I started it with this mediocre email news about my creative work.
Moral of the Story
At the end of the day I spent a lot of time thinking about why the day went as badly as it did, and pinpointed my morning disappointment as a big cause of that. There was no real reason for me to be checking my email right then: anything I could possibly have had to deal with could have waited a few measly hours when I was more awake and invested in the day. The drawbacks of that morning email check definitely outweighed the benefits.
Moving forward, the incident is a big incentive for me to just fucking avoid this kind of morning email checking, since it’s just not necessary for me anymore. It’s also REALLY good incentive to BE LESS BUSY, since then I’ll have more time to deal with my daily To-Do lists naturally rather than feeling like I have to squeeze every last ounce of productivity out of whatever time I can. That gets really exhausting really fast.
I’m curious about how the creative folks out there handle email and texting, especially if you do a lot of emailing related to your creative work. Do you find yourself checking messages too often? Or do you feel like you’re naturally able to keep up with them during the day? Let me know in the comments, hit me up on Twitter or Facebook, or send me an email (oh, the irony!), since it’d be nice to keep the conversation going :-)