You are probably one of those people who, at the end of your work day or when you start it, make a small planning of tasks that you want to carry out. Then there is the day to day, which is what marks our work future in terms of management... and it is those tasks that come from who knows where that make us fall into the trap of putting out fires as best we can with the feeling of always being on the edge of our seats and not achieving everything we want.
It is the eternal dilemma between strategic and operational management, between what is important and what is urgent . Throughout the day we have countless nursing homes email list distractions in our work, some of which are avoidable, such as WhatsApp, social networks or the notification of any application installed on our smartphone. Others are much more difficult to control, and in this area we can place phone calls and email as the main elements.
In this article we are going to focus on what we know best: email.
You will have already read many articles about how to manage email efficiently where, among many other tips, they talk about dedicating a fixed amount of time to answering and managing email, and if possible, at certain pre-established times.
Push Notifications
How to effectively manage email
And the truth is that on paper it looks great, but who isn't tempted to open the email when they see that the number of emails in their inbox is growing at an alarming rate? We always have the doubt of whether there is something really important that can't wait or also when we are going to answer an email that we urgently need to deal with at that moment and while we're at it we take a look at the rest.
Who isn't tempted to open an email when they see that the number of emails in their inbox is growing to an alarming degree?
The notifications we receive when an email arrives are all very striking : in the application icon on the dock or taskbar, in the browser tab, a floating notice on your computer's desktop, push notifications on your mobile, etc. which, in addition to being very visual, also include alert sounds.
Emails tend to arrive in dribs and drabs, and at the same rate we can interrupt the task we are doing to return to it minutes later, and so on many times throughout the day, diminishing our productive capacity.
How does email management affect productivity and stress?
The University of California, Microsoft Research and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) conducted a study to test how 40 computer scientists behaved when using email over a 12-day period .
To do this, they took into account three patterns: the number of times they checked their email, the time they spent on it, and the interruptions they suffered as a result. And the result is not surprising: the more time spent checking email, the lower the productivity and the higher the stress levels.
How to pause your Gmail inbox with Inbox Pause
If you are one of those who use Gmail or manage your corporate email through it, we are going to let you know about an Inbox Pause feature from the Boomerang extension that directly pauses your inbox.
It may be a somewhat drastic solution, but if you are one of those people who cannot resist email notifications and seeing them causes you stress and anxiety, we recommend that you switch to “out of sight, out of mind” mode.
You can download this extension from here and start enjoying it from the first minute, because it is also free in some of its modalities.
Gmail Inbox Pause Settings
Pause the inboxIt is really simple, once installed the Pause button will appear in the upper left corner and when you click on it a floating window will appear from where you can manage the different available options.
