I'm addicted to my emails, how to get out?
At a time when e-mail has supplanted postal mail, the boundary between personal and professional life has been considerably narrowed. Just out of work, sometimes late at night, you are tempted to continue to check your emails. To avoid lose productivity, and especially preserve your intimate life, it is essential to know how to take breaks to get a job.
Set limits
Create an automatic absence message that you activate the evening by leaving your office, to prevent the interlocutors who would seek to join you.
Make a short list of the few people to whom you must respond imperatively and systematically, and you will discover in the end that few of them occupy such a status!
If your employer has provided you with a business notebook , make sure you leave it at the office in the evenings, weekends, and holidays. In case of real emergency, do not worry, because the person concerned in your team or your hierarchy will know perfectly how to contact you on your personal phone.
If you are your own boss, try to subscribe a professional subscription and cut your phone after 19h to reconnect it the next morning.
On vacation, if you really can not do otherwise, try to discipline yourself by giving yourself the objective of consulting your emails only every 2 daysor every night.
Learn how to "fast"
Take a cure without Internet in a place specially dedicated to cure this type of dependence, and you will discover that the earth did not stop turning and that your interlocutors managed to manage otherwise! This may involve learning to delegate and trust a colleague or assistant.
The "digital detox" of this kind have multiplied in recent years and are enjoying immense success. We learn to go back to basics and to eliminate immediacy. This requires of course to organize upstream and inform people accustomed to what you answer in the quarter of an hour of your new work habits.
Beware of technology
On the technical side, you can also delete the "push" function of your phone. This feature sets your phone to automatically connect to your email as soon as a new email is received. So opt for a manual connection, this will avoid you in addition to constantly hear this little warning sound that resonates upon the arrival of a mail.
Finally, learn to be 100% at what you do and to fully live the present moment : if you are at the gym, leave your cell phone in the cloakroom; if you attend a concert or go out for dinner, turn it off and forget about it.
Read also :
>>> 7 tips to better manage your time at work
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Posted on August 21, 2018.