How Often Should I Check Email? | Deep Questions With Cal Newport

00:00:00.000 | All right, question two about deep work comes from Aron, who says, "I'm curious about how

00:00:08.480 | you approach budgeting time for email checks. I recently read an academic paper that found,

00:00:15.280 | on average, the optimal number of email checks for mitigating stress is two to four times per day.

00:00:19.840 | I find four leads to too much hyperactive hive minding, but one leads to stress accumulating

00:00:26.400 | over how much is waiting. So what is the right number?" First, that stress issue is a good one.

00:00:34.320 | I don't know if this is the paper you're thinking about, but there's a good paper I cite in my book,

00:00:39.040 | "A World Without Email," that was written by Gloria Mark, lead authored by Gloria Mark of

00:00:44.240 | UC Irvine, that studied stress in relationship to email. They used heart rate monitors and

00:00:50.320 | cameras. They could look for heat blooms on workers' faces, and they could

00:00:55.360 | cross, what we call it, correlate this data with logs that kept track of when people were checking

00:01:00.960 | email. And they found that, look, if you batch your email, everyone says, "Check your email once

00:01:04.400 | a day," it is really stressful because you know there's stuff building up you're not getting to,

00:01:09.280 | and it's pissing people off, and that makes people stress. They found that this stress was

00:01:12.880 | particularly acute for some people more than others. If you want to use the big five personality

00:01:17.760 | inventory, those who rate high on trait neuroticism tend to get very stressed by email batching.

00:01:23.360 | I think this is an important observation because it underscores a point I make in that book again and again.

00:01:28.400 | You do not solve the problems generated by email by having better habits for interacting with your inbox.

00:01:35.920 | You have to stop all those stressful emails from landing in your inbox in the first place.

00:01:43.200 | So I don't really think that much about how many times should you check your email should you batch it.

00:01:48.400 | What I care about is how do you change the role email plays in your work so that no matter when you check your email,

00:01:54.640 | it's not stressful. It's not something you have to do all day. It's not something if you wait to do for most of the day that it's going to be a particular source of anxiety.

00:02:03.360 | That actually takes work. You have to rethink the role of email in all of your work processes so that you do not have an inbox full of urgent things.

00:02:13.440 | Two quick heuristics about doing that. Again, I wrote a whole book about this.

00:02:16.800 | Let me just give you two quick heuristics. One, remember that the real productivity poison when it comes to email is messages that arrive at unscheduled times and will require your response.

00:02:31.440 | When figuring out the basic processes you use to execute your work, that is what you want to minimize.

00:02:37.600 | Not complexity, not time required to get something done. Number of unscheduled messages that require a response.

00:02:44.720 | That is what you want to reduce. That is what creates stress in your inbox.

00:02:48.960 | Knowing that at any moment, messages could be arriving that require a response sooner being better than later.

00:02:54.240 | As long as that is largely the reality of how you interact with your inbox, you will have to be in there all the time,

00:02:59.440 | which is very distracting, or trying to batch and be really stressed about it.

00:03:03.680 | Second heuristic I will briefly mention for taming your inbox is remembering that email is best for delivering information, contracts, files, announcements, or non-urgent questions that can be answered with one reply.

00:03:24.160 | So if I need to know, can you remind me again when your trip to Georgia is? That is a great use of email. I can send it to you. It is not stressful when you see that message. You can answer it whenever. It is not urgent.

00:03:38.560 | And that is a much better way for me to get that information than to interrupt you or to stop by your office.

00:03:43.760 | Anything beyond that, and in particular, back and forth conversation, anything that requires back and forth conversation, find another place to do it.

00:03:52.000 | And don't just say Slack because that creates the same problem of I have to keep monitoring Slack to do these back and forth.

00:03:57.440 | Office hours, like we talked about in episode two of nine, docket clearing meetings with your team, informal conversation,

00:04:05.760 | I grab you in the hallway when I see you passing by. Hey, quick question, could we figure this out? Or tacking things on to existing meetings.

00:04:13.360 | Hey, as long as we're here talking about whatever, let's handle X, Y, and Z real fast as well. Do not use email for back and forth conversation.

00:04:21.760 | Let me just give a quick vent here. I've had this happen twice in the last week. And really, this captures my frustration with email, encapsulates it.

00:04:32.960 | Twice in the past week, this has happened. Someone will send an email to me and a couple other people, usually like a scheduling type of thing.

00:04:42.960 | Like, hey, when are we going to get together on this? And they'll send this email like in the one case at four o'clock.

00:04:48.960 | I don't see it because I didn't happen to check email after four o'clock. And I made the next day I finally get the checking email after I write and it's noon.

00:04:55.360 | And they have a bunch of back and forth discussion that's ended with like having to call me out specifically. So Cal, what is your answer here?

00:05:04.320 | As if like something weird happened, like I must have somehow missed or ignored their thread, because I didn't answer it at 430 or at 9am the next morning.

00:05:13.280 | And whenever I encountered that, and that's happened to me twice. One of them was 4pm the message was sent and by like 10am the next morning, they were repeating it for me.

00:05:21.360 | Cal, what's your answer here? What's going on? The other one was on a Saturday. And by Sunday, this person was saying, Cal, what's going on? What's your answer here?

00:05:30.240 | When I see that, I say, OK, this is someone who is completely captured in the hyperactive hive mind.

00:05:34.800 | Your entire work is just doing these back and forth ongoing conversations.

00:05:38.800 | And if that's the way you do all of your work, you're dependent on everyone else to do the same thing.

00:05:43.760 | I refuse to do it. I also refuse to apologize. I answer when I get to it.

How Often Should I Check Email? | Deep Questions With Cal Newport

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