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Showing items tagged with "email and sleep" - 2 found.

Email addiction is bad for your well-being

Are you addicted to email which is leading to poor sleep and the ability to concentrate?  Probably according to recent research from the Sleep Council and others.

Whilst Sheryl Sandberg in ‘Lean In’ urges us to work full on, others such as Arianna Huffington have recognised the effect lack of sleep can have on ones well being, creativity and overall productivity –  see ‘Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Happier Life’.  If billionaire’s with all the support they need are struggling what hope is there for us mere mortals?  France and Germany  are attempting to address the situation by passing a law prohibiting managers sending employers work emails after 6.00 pm.

Reduce your email addiction

Yet in the 24x7x365 many feel they must remain connected at all times, a fact highlighted at several recent Smart Email Management workshops we have run over the last few weeks.  Many feel that their clients expect them to be available and respond to emails no matter what time of day.  But do they?  Is this more about either a perception that they are the only ones who can deal with the situation whatever that might be or a chronic case of email addiction.

My personal opinion is that it is  a combination of both which is damaging to ones work performance and personal life and not least your sex life.   We all need a certain amount of privacy and down time.  Here are my five top tips to improve the quality of both ones sleep and hence performance (at work and home) by switching off from email.

1. Check your level of email addiction
2. Discuss with your manager ways to take a break – for example delegate access to others and especially if you are in front line operations.
3. Set a boundary after which time you no longer read emails eg after 9.30 pm.  (VW recently stopped pushing emails from managers to employees mailboxes.)  If you use your phone to pick up work emails – there will be a switch to stop having them pushed at you.  Find it.
4. Leave all your mobile devices outside the bedroom door (from ipad to iphone).
5. Use your Out of Office message (auto reply) to manage senders expectations.

It’s interesting that research we conducted revealed that it is generally internal senders who expect the quickest reply.  It is probably these internal senders who also are driving up the 24x7x365 culture and not the clients themselves.

What is your opinion?  Do you ever disconnect from email for more than three hours?  If so, what is the impact on you and your business?

If either you or your colleagues need help with email addiction please call us to help how we have helped others reduce their email addiction and improve their performance and work-life balance.

Tags: email addiction, email and sleep, Out of Office, performance, sleep depravation, VW, well being, Work life balance

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The tortoise approach to reducing email overload

Over the last month I have noticed myself increasingly unable to focus and do any blue sky thinking.  Is it age?  ‘When I am Sixty Four’ by the Beetles does have a certain resonance with me.  Having just won two significant pieces of silver on the golf course, given a couple of major presentations  and been recruiting for a new CEO for the Dorset Chamber of Commerce that might not seem likely. Then  I checked my email and social networking behavior.

Tortoise approach to email overload

Several articles have caught my attention recently.  Two related to the tortoise and hare fable.  First was Schumpeter’s ‘In praise of laziness’ and second was Susie Boyt’s ‘Tortoises knows a thing or two’.  Both urge us to slow down and know when it’s time to stop and take stock.  We are bombarded with emails night and day and the urge to check them every few minutes has created two serious new diseases: email overload and email addiction both of which I have frequently written.  Was I now falling victim to  one of both of them?

The third article to make me sit up was Emma Jacobs’s ‘Help to get a good night’s sleep’.  Checking your emails late at night is know to be disruptive and can result in disturbed sleep patterns.  In this recent article by Emma Jacobs she again stresses the need for down time to create a quiet mind which in turns enables us to focus and feel less stressed.

Monitoring my connectivity for 48 hours I realised I had slipped into some appalling and destructive habits:

• checking my emails late at night after an evening meeting/night out socially;
• letting new emails disturb my train of thought;
• simply deleting unwanted newsletters etc rather than unsubscribing;
• surfing Twitter and social networking sites for no particular reason – well maybe to see if anyone had picked on one of my posts.

In short I was suffering from chronic email and information overload which in turn was creating attention deficit.  Here is the five point action plan I prescribed myself.

1. Hibernate my inbox from unwanted emails: be ruthlessly unsubscribing from every newsletter I delete because it is of no interest (either opened or not).
   

   Email overload medicine

2. Hibernate all my electronic devices between 10.00 pm and 8.00 am. (If anyone really needs me they know my landline number.)
3. Hibernate my inbox for at least one hour intervals and hence reduce the number of times I check my emails.
4. Hibernate the email function of my smart phone fifteen minutes before meetings and whilst out walking and socialising.
5. Hibernate after reading emails and remember that not every email needs a reply.

In other words become a tortoise more often during the day and take time to look around, smell the roses, and let my mind wander free of clutter and other people’s actions lists.  Is the anti-email overload medicine working.  Its early days but my mind does seem quieter and gradually I am regaining my ability to blue sky and think outside the box.  Next is to re-start practicing mindfulness and review my eating habits.

Tags: email and mindfullness, email and sleep, email overload, email overload medicine, tortoise and email overload

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