Should you check your email in the morning?
During my trip to the library, I picked up another Julie Morgenstern book. This time it’s Never Check E-Mail in the Morning.
I haven’t started the book yet. I’m hoping to find some interesting information in there. But I have to wonder about her title.
Is it feasible to skip checking email in the morning? I check mine to get my daily schedule and see what I need to work on that day.
However, I could see putting off email until you’ve had a chance to sit down and review your to-do list and see where you stand. Get some good, solid planning done before you open email and see what fires you need to put out.
If you plan your day before you check email (making sure you keep some flexibility in there), you can work in a calm setting. No emergencies. Just a solid look at what you need to accomplish.
After you get a majority of your thinking and planning done, then you can check your email to see if any of your priorities need to change.
At one of my previous jobs, though, my boss insisted that I check email first thing in the morning. Since I was checking customer email, he wanted to know if there were any issues from the night before that need resolution. I never quite felt like I was able to plan my day.
I was immediately set into a reactionary position, rather than a proactive mindset. Of course, that job also revolved around email, so it was pretty important that I check it frequently. But with so many interruptions, it definitely made it hard to get any long-term work and planning done.
Do you check email first thing in the morning? Why or why not? Does it help you plan your day, or does it seem like it’s immediately putting you behind?
7 Comments
As an entrepreneurial coach, I talk with people frequently about how they work. It can seem like such a little thing, choosing to be reactionary or proactive, can set your whole day off in a particular direction.
I totally agree with taking the 1st 15 minutes to plan your day and then moving on to e-mail. It makes crisis planning more manageable (if there is a crisis).
Hi,
i think that it is important to check your mail in the morning. I recommend checking mail 3 times a day, so that you do not get interrupted too often.
One of my favorite practices is to get up early in the morning and to do my mail first thing in the morning before breakfast. You then have already cleaned you inbox and also completed your planning for the day – including some urgent matter that came in over night.
I published about 200 concrete time saving tips to gain an extra hour every day on the Time Management Master blog. These tips can be applied at home, at work or on the road.
Every person is different and so are the tips. Please let me know if you found something that worked for you.
Thanks
Nicolas
One of the best suggestions we make in our training courses is that people particularly if they are using outlook or lotus notes or groupwise is to set up and initial view that does not show them their email but rather (in outlook for example) their calendar and their tasks. This allows them to focus initially on what they have to do for the day and then they can go and look at their email with a plan for the day already in mind.
Nicolas’s idea of limited the number of times you check your email to 3-4 times a day is also a great one.
It can be tough to limit email to 3-4 times a day if your work depends on it, but I do agree that you need to put limits on how often you check it. You need to set aside uninterrupted time to get work done.
I like the idea of seeing your calendar first, rather than email. Helps you know what is coming for the day.
I was thinking…in the beginning it might be useful to set alarms so that you spend a designated amount of time looking at e-mail. That way you develop a routine and train yourself to use brief, highly focused times on checking e-mail.
I am a big advocate of using alarms and reminders to ‘train’ yourself to get a good habit, it seems like a great idea to me.
@Elli – timers are great for using a specific time frame, whether it’s for checking email, filing, shredding, or any number of tasks. It’s a good time management tool.
@Paul – it certainly helps you be more conscious of the time you’re spending on tasks. I think I should use it more often.