I am deep in the throes of withdrawal due to my new e-mail policy.
You see, e-mail addiction is just like any other addiction. Think about the symptoms for any hardcore drug of choice. Anxiety. Needing a hit first thing in the morning. Impacting your social life. Impacting your time with friends or family. Now take a hard look at how e-mail is impacting your life. Any similarities?
In fact, for me, it is much WORSE to cutoff the e-mail than it was to deal with a coffee/caffeine addiction! I really used to love my Americano’s.
For the first couple days…it was a fun experiment. Now, a little over a week into it, I’m really feeling the pain. You see, I started my experiment when things weren’t too crazy at work. Now….I am incredibly busy. Running around across Microsoft campus eats up most of my time. There are lots of conversations that I feel the need to engage in and the teams I work with are located over a distributed campus spread over 2 square miles.
Nonetheless, I have stuck it out. The only times I check e-mail outside of my twice a day windows of time for:
- Dealing with e-mails that relate to urgent upcoming appointments where someone is postponing meeting, conference rooms are changing or things are getting canceled.
- Sending outgoing mail relating to a project I am working on where a prompt response is needed.
- Referencing previously read e-mail that directly pertains to the project I am engaged with at that time. For example…if I am preparing a research summary, I will read the archived mail I might have to gather data points for the summary. In this regard, I am simply using the e-mail as a content source, I am not sending or reading anything new.
Outside of these situations, I don’t even look at it. I turned off Outlook reminders, the little mail notification icon in the system tray and all audible mail alerts. I am blissfully ignorant….or at least that was what I hoped to be!
However, even without the steady new mail notifications I get a nervous twitch every 10 minutes or so to check e-mail. I’ve actually timed it. In fact, the temptation also arises ANY TIME I come back to desk from any period of time outside my office. It could be a 2 minute walk to the kitchen or a 90 minute meeting. It still has the same affect.
When I stopped drinking coffee (a couple months ago), The first week was pretty easy since it was a new challenge for me to sink my teeth into. The next 3 weeks were awful. I had a constant craving for it in morning. I felt really tired until around 10am…and then the fog lifted. After the first month, however, the cravings stopped and while I do enjoy the taste of coffee, I am not compelled to drink it any more.
There are no more PHYSICAL symptoms or urges. They just went away.
Looking forward to getting to this point with e-mail.
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