This is a place for displaying some concepts of the Sherpa System.
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Overcoming the Tyranny of the Inbox
Often time, a busy executive comes back to his or her desk after a meeting (or maybe back-to-back meetings). What is the first thing they typically do when they sit down at their desk in front of their computer? Check their email of course.
Studies find that what you do next, in the next precious 20 or 40 minutes (before your next meeting, lunch, time to go home, etc.) is often disproportionately influenced by the last 20 or 30 emails you got. That is what is on top of your inbox, and staring you in the face.
Email is not a “level playing field” for prioritizing your next actions.
Why is this a problem for working productively, being strategic, and reaching your goals?
People can justify the constant checking of email (the biggest attention hijacker in US business) because isn’t email work? Do you get paid to check email or deliver results?
FACTS:
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The average professional check their inbox once every 7 minutes, or 77 times a day. That adds up to 24% of their day. That is 1 day lost in a 5-day work week!
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Typical lost time caused by an email was 9 minutes and 30 seconds in length. Now that was just the time spent on the email itself.
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After that, it still took the participants of the study another 16 minutes to regain focus on their primary task. Scientists call that Attention Residue.
If you want to be successful and a leader, you need to:
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Be deliberant with your time and attention (avoid being pulled by forces like Completion Bias, dopamine squirts, FOMO, and our evolutionary hardwiring).
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Spend your attention on the most important things, not the quasi-urgent.
The important things tend to be strategic projects, and email tends to be unimportant and random small stuff that rarely is going to help you reach your goals or finish projects.
Remember, your attention is you most precious resource, and a non-renewable one at that. One that attention is spent, you can never get that time back.
There are many practices and habits to
OVERCOME THE TYRANNY OF THE INBOX
but here are 3 easy tactics to get you started:
These solutions are the lowest-hanging fruit. They make email less costly, but they can’t completely eliminate the costs of asynchronous communications. Next-level solutions involve deprioritizing email and augmenting it with less costly means of communication.
For example, you can set up virtual office hours to answer ad hoc questions. Or design a communications plan that relies on less frequent, higher-value emails. If you can cut your number of non-spam emails to 30 per day, that’s a number you can easily manage in one to two daily email clearing sessions.
“Email is the Fool's Gold of Productivity”
– Cal Newport, PhD
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