Your inbox is a productivity trap
Plus some tactics to stay focussed
Here’s a story that might sound familiar. You’re working on something creative. It requires sustained focus. You’ve got a pretty good rhythm going on but you get blocked—there is a piece of information you need. You remember that your colleague sent it to you in an email the other day. So you open your inbox to find it. But, before you can find that one specific email, you notice some unread messages. From the subject lines, they seem important and/or interesting.
You click through to read.
Sometime later—perhaps a few minutes, perhaps half an hour—you realize you’ve been side tracked from your original goal. It doesn’t really matter how long that distraction was. Your creative momentum was destroyed.
Your inbox is a trap. It’s full of distractions and unplanned work. Even if you don’t click those enticing subject lines—if you manage to get the information you need and get out—those unread emails will continue taking up valuable mental space.
When you return to your creative work, some part of your brain will linger on what it saw there. “I wonder what Jim’s Question about our numbers was,” your brain will say. “I hope our numbers are okay. Maybe I should check?"
This is true for all sorts of tools—not just your email. Any tool or service that has notifications that you can read or “unread”—like Slack, LinkedIn, or your go-to project management software—is a dangerous place to visit during focused time.
The maker in me says avoid these tools like the plague. The manager still finds them quite valuable—despite the constant battle against distraction and context switching. Using these tools effective requires good tactics.
A few tactics I’ve been using:
Using “focus” mode when possible.
Turn off notifications to avoid getting distracted by unread messages.
Scheduling explicit “inbox” time each day.
Take a block of time and go through all your unread messages.
If you can respond in a few minutes, do it.
If you have to leave your inbox to address it, schedule a time for it later—ideally, batched with similar tasks.
Set up automations to tag and sort new messages into appropriate categories.
Have these categories hidden from you default view. So that you have to be intentional about viewing them.
This works great for important but not urgent tasks that can be batched together. I do this with GitHub notifications, for example. I have to be aware of and review new Pull Requests, but I don’t need to know abaout them immediatley.
Back to building,
- Russell