This past month, I’ve been working on spam filters for my clients as well as for my business. In that time, I have accidentally turned off email on my iPhone. I didn’t think I checked emails THAT often. But it took me three days to stop constantly looking for it and get over it is missing from the phone. I never realized I was GREATLY addicted to checking email constantly.
Not Checking Email Can Be a Good Thing
About five years ago, I read a book by Julie Morgenstein called, “Never Check Your Email in the Morning.” In that book, it prioritizes that you should only check your email at certain times of the day and that email can be a distraction. Of course, that book was written long before we got more addicted to our smartphones.
Now between Twitter, Facebook, email and social media, our entire society has become a group of people who do nothing but look down and study their phones. I go to restaurants and see people eating together but not talking with one another but texting and pulling email on their phones. It took this unplanned experiment for me to realize that checking my email all the time is not good and rude to most around me. Furthermore, I realize I can get more done when I am not distracted by email on my phone.
It’s been two weeks and this experiment has changed my ability to communicate with those I was with. I now can read at the gym without being distracted. It has given me more productive in my work and allows me to focus more on the tasks at hand.
So I decided not to fix it.
I no longer check email on my phone.
Why I No Longer Check Email on my Phone
This little experiment has made me wonder what other elements can I cut out of my life? I suffer from ADD so anything that routinely distracts me needs to be examined. Can I schedule other parts? Perhaps social media, maybe telephone calls, other people that I work with?
I’m not telling you that you shouldn’t check your email, nor am I saying you probably shouldn’t check your email on your phone, but for me, I have found it completely liberating to no longer have access to email all the time. “I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”
Are you addicted to email? What other business elements do you do in access?