Productivity Means Avoiding Email

For anyone dealing in, with or near technology, email is a saviour and a pariah.

Email, although useful, can suck up your time in multiple-hour chunks - and considering I get hundreds of emails a day I need to take action on, it can render someone almost unproductive.

This blog post has a bunch of interesting (some tongue-in-cheek) tips for productivity. Some are applicable in your situation, some are not. However, if you feel like you or your employees are working but aren't producing, check this out:

Only doing email twice a day will make you far more productive for the rest of the day. The problem with email is that getting an email triggers that same endorphin hit I mentioned above -- the one that a mouse gets when he bonks on the button in the cage and gets a food pellet.

Responding to an email triggers that same hit. The pleasure chemical hits your neocortex and you go "ahhh" inside and feel like you've done something.

So you sit and work with your mail client open and you interrupt your work every time an email comes in and you answer it and you send another email and you feel great in the moment. But what you're really doing is fracturing your time, interrupting your flow, and killing your ability to focus on anything long enough to get real high-quality work done.

This one is far easier to say than do. And it won't be feasible during projects where lots of updates during the day really are important -- raising money, for example, or closing a big deal.

There is a ton of value to just walking over to the next cube and directly communicating.

We all, at times, hide from each other behind carpeted low cubicle walls at times, instead of using technology as a tool we use it as a shield.

Major hat tip to one of my favorite blogs, 43folders, where they look at a couple of the other items in this article. Merlin Mann, thank you.