Getting Control Of Your Email - Break The Addiction

"You've got mail" has become one of the more famous phrases of our times.  Email, it seems, has taken control of our lives.  If someone doesn't respond to an email we start thinking - what is wrong?  If they haven't checked our email in the last 10 or 15 minutes some people start to get very anxious .  Have you ever been tempted to email the person across the table absorbed in checking their Blackberry so you could get their attention back to a real face-to-face conversation?

In an earlier post I suggested one way to get your email addiction under control was to check your email only at regular intervals.  To help do this I suggested that you go into your email device settings and set them to "off" or "none".  By doing this you remove the constant reminder - a new email just came in - "look at me".  One of my favorite bloggers, Matt Moran, recently wrote in the ITtoolbox blog about a great refinement to this technique.  Matt has modified his email signature to include:

====================================
IMPORTANT NOTICE ON EMAIL & REACHING ME:
- as of 11/20/2007
As an exercise in effectiveness, I will begin checking email less regularly - once in the morning and once in the late afternoon.

If your message is critical, please call. If it is not critical, please be patient and I will get back with you.

The great thing about this is that by doing so he is starting to set the expectations of the people he communicates with.  Not only does this reduce the pressure to respond immediately it may also help reduce the "did you get my email?" emails.  It changes the whole tone of the conversation from frenzied to timely which is rather nice I would say.

No doubt you're thinking - what has all this have to do with me,  I'm not addicted to email.  Fortunately, I found some great indicators to see if you are addicted and also to ways to "cure" yourself.

David Ferrabee is Managing Director, Change and Internal Communications at Hill & Knowlton UK (in international communications and public relations firm) has written about email addiction in the Hill & Knowlton Collective Conversation blog.  Ferrabee asks a series of pointed questions in the that might give an indication you are addicted to email.  My favorite is:

Do you suddenly have very toned thumbs?

Marsha Egan has also developed a list of tell-tale signs in the Jeff Foxworthy "You might be a redneck" format.  My favorite is:

You know you're an E-Mail E-ddict when . . .?

- You email yourself if you haven't received email for several minutes,   just to make sure the email system hasn't gone down...

OK, so you are addicted (aren't we all).  In my earlier post I suggested that maybe you're ready for a 12-step program. Well fortunately there is help available.

• Marsha Egan has a book "12 Steps to Curing Your Email E-Ddiction" (I haven't read it myself so I can not offer an opinion).
• If you don't have time for 12 steps try Lenny Greenberg's 5 step email addiction cure.
• Tim Sanders has a great series on email rules
• The folks at ITSecurity have a great article, Hacking Email: 99 Email Security and Productivity Tips
• My take on the ITSecurity article.

What are your thoughts?  Leave a comment (please no emails).

"all business" photo by kenyee

"Matt Moran" photo from Matt Moran - Caffeine / Life / Technology / Music

If this topic was of interest, you might also like these:

• It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear
• Break the BlackBerry and Laptop Addiction
• Email Disclaimers and the Road to Hell
• Or the posts in the "PCs & Email" category