Focus
A few weeks ago I posted on Mastodon that I cleaned up my personal email. That prompted Jake to reply to me and talk about how we use email:
yeah, my personal email is like my to-do list. I have 24 things in there right now but I always manage to trim it down to under 20 or so, some are very old (oldest in my inbox is a mantra reminder from 2019, the first thing). haha. But this is how I keep track of everything. No idea how people do it without hahaha
As we got deeper into conversation we shifted to work email, and how it's The Worst (I'm paraphrasing). One of the issues I have while I'm working is the constant barrage of notifications. If it's not email, it's Teams. Teams is objectively the worst - I hate that the taskbar icon remains highlighted for as long as you have an unread notification.
At least Outlook has the decency to restrict itself to an envelope on the icon; that's distracting, but at least it isn't displaying a neon sign saying "HEY! READ ME! HEY!".
I can't do much about Teams, unfortunately; I do need to see when I have notifications because Teams has replaced desktop phones in our organization. I believe this is the case across MANY corporations, and even Canada's Federal Government employees (I have a friend who works at Canada Revenue Agency and he mentioned using Teams).
But, I have a measure of control over email notifications. I don't mind getting the pop-up notification in the corner indicating there's a new email. It gives me a quick view of the subject line and a brief snippet of the body, allowing me to decide if I want to stop working on my current task and view the email. Or, the opposite: ignore the email and continue working. But that envelope in the taskbar...
I thought I would try turning it off in the settings. I wondered briefly if that would create issues - that I might forget I have an email waiting for me to read that might be important and require attention. But I thought about it some more, returning to my discussion with Jake. We both use our email inboxes as a sort of task list, so turning off the envelope means I am taking control of when I look at my email.
Email is no longer an instant communication method - that's what Teams is for. If someone is emailing something, it's probably not significantly urgent, or at the very least was something too long for a Teams message. Sort of like how blog posts are too long for Mastodon. With those pop-up notifications I get notified that yes, I have a new email message, and you probably won't find it difficult to believe that I'm able to keep that in the back of my head and check my email when I'm done working on whatever it is I'm working on1.
I've been operating this way for 11 days now - basically two business weeks. It's working for me, I think. I'm less distracted, and I'm able to better focus on my tasks instead of stopping and switching from window-to-window. And so far, no one has mentioned anything about slow responses, or sent me a Teams message when I haven't replied yet.
I 100% recommend turning off the "envelope" icon for new email messages if you use Outlook at work, especially if you work on tasks that require a certain level of focus.
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