Boundaries With Email

Transcript

Something I've already mentioned is not starting your day by checking your email. But let me just tell you: email can tyrannize your work schedule, no matter what time of day it is. Email is a blessing and a curse in so many different ways. It allows us to communicate asynchronously, and it allows us to communicate quickly, and it allows us to share files, and do all kinds of wonderful things, but it also has created in us this terrible habit of always being on our phone, always refreshing, always checking our inbox, always looking for that next little "bloop!" thing that pops into your email inbox. It's a bad habit. Don't let your email tyrannize your week. You can start to lose control of your week if you're not careful, and if you're always responding to various emails.

Some tricks I've seen people use with varying degrees of success are you can do something like say you're only going to check your email from this particular time to this time, or before this time but not after this time, or set some sort of expectation that you are not going to be looking at your email inbox all day, every day. I've met some people who say "I check my email three times a day: at this hour, this hour, and this hour." I've never been that rigid, especially because in my line of work I have tech support issues that I have to deal with sometimes that are after hours, but that's a really good boundary to set.

If you have an employer that's constantly bombarding you with emails, if they can't see you because you're not in the next office, it might be hard for them to know just how much they're overloading you with emails. And sometimes employers or clients can be really irritable about "I sent you an email, you haven't responded yet," or they'll forget that they sent you five different emails and you'll respond to one but not the other. So in whatever way makes sense to you, try to ensure that your email inbox is not something that's in front of you all day, every day, and try to make sure that you don't allow your email to derail your schedule.

You might need to tell your clients something like "I got this email; I can't do anything about it now. Let's talk about it tomorrow at 11:00. Would that work for you?" Or you might have to tell your boss "I'm happy to look into this, but you asked me to look into three other things earlier today with three different emails. Which one do you want me to focus on?"

There are methods and practices that you can put into place to make sure that you put boundaries around your email inbox so that you don't treat it like it's the most important thing in your life and that you have to drop everything else you're doing to respond to email. That's such a bad habit. And unfortunately it's a very common habit where people, even if they've blocked out hours in their day to follow their schedule where they're going to do this, this, this, and this, one or two random emails that pop into their inbox can totally ruin their day. Don't let that happen to you. And if you need to push back against your employer or your clients in order to make that happen, feel free to do so, respectfully.