'Don't Check Email First Thing' Is Unrealistic For You? Try This Instead

EDITOR’S NOTE: This post is adapted from the Forbes eBook, The Millennial Game Plan: Career And Money Secrets To Succeed In Today's World, by Laura Shin. If you'd like to learn more about how to maximize your productivity, the title is available now for download at Apple (iBooks), Amazon, (Kindle) and Vook (Nook, etc.).

You may have heard of this popular productivity tip: Don’t check email in the morning.

If you’re like most people, your reaction might have been half “that’s genius!” and the other half “that’s never going to work.”

The many problems with email begin with the fact that we receive both essential and inessential communications all in the same spot. Sorting through email and deciding what’s important and what isn’t, and what requires a response, what you should delete and what you should archive takes a lot of energy.

And no one has a limitless amount of that precious resource. In fact, the amount we have is, scientifically, finite — actually dependent on the food (energy) we take in — and  the more decisions we make throughout the day, the more our energy gets depleted.

A study of parole board hearings by Columbia Business School and Ben Gurion University found that after lunch parole board officers granted 60% of paroles. But before lunch, when they were hungry and their glucose levels were dropping, they only granted 20%. They were falling victim to decision fatigue, which causes us to start making reckless decisions or to stop making decisions at all.

So the impulse to say, “Don’t check your email in the morning” is a good one, even if it may not feel realistic. Decision-making is an energy-hungry task. Our tanks are full in the morning, so that energy should be reserved for something important. Since email is usually the means by which other people get you to pay attention to the tasks important to them, it’s understandable that some experts would caution you against using the time of day when you have the most brain power to get them ahead on their goals instead of moving forward on your own.

But since that may not be realistic for everyone, here are some other tips for minimizing the time you spend on email, depending on the type of work you do.

1. First thing, prioritize your goals.

If you do check email in the morning, prioritize your goals beforehand. “There are so many potential distractions and details that can take our attention, we need to be really clear about the most important things,” says David Rock, director of the NeuroLeadership Institute and author of Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long. “If you can’t recall what your goals are, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to scan the environment for things relevant to your goals.” Knowing your own top-line objectives will make it easier for you to scan your emails and decide what to do about each one.

2. If you’re working on a creative project, really do leave email till as late as possible.

The downtime will leave room for insights to pop into your mind. “As soon as you download your emails, your brain gets overwhelmed with information and ideas, and your personal objectives and goals start to slip out the window. Leave it as late as possible in the day, so you can get your own work done,” says Rock.

You could, for instance, decide to spend two hours every morning writing and not let yourself check email until those two hours are done. Or maybe your rule could be not to look at your inbox until you’ve written 500 words for the day.

3. If you manage a team that needs direction from you or work in a field where time sensitivity is critical, just answer the most important messages right away.

But since you’ve already determined your top priorities, really limit email in the morning only to the most critical messages so you can use the rest of that precious morning energy for the tasks most important to you. You could then work for the rest of the day in, say, 50-minute spurts broken up by 10-minute email check-ins (or whatever schedule works for you).

4. If you have a job in which a central task involves email upkeep …

Naturally you’ll want to make that your main focus. However, if you do have other tasks that you can never seem to get to, try doing a reverse balance between your own work and email — maybe 15-minute spurts of working on another project, and 45 minutes per hour for email.

Old habits die hard, and considering how addictive technology is, the impulse to email can be particularly hard to kill off. But if you need any stronger motivator to coming up with a smarter working schedule, consider this: Constant emailing and text-messaging decreases your mental capability by an average of 10 IQ points  (five for women and 15 for men), according to a University of London study. For men, that effect is three times greater than that of smoking marijuana.

Now, you (or at least most of us) wouldn’t inhale at work, so why would you tackle your email in a way that was the equivalent of working while stoned?

You can buy “The Millennial Game Plan: Career And Money Secrets To Succeed In Today’s World,” at Apple (iBooks), Amazon, (Kindle) and Vook (Nook, etc.). now. Learn how to forge a career in a nasty job market, earn more, finance your own ventures, focus in an age of distraction, make the grad school decision and manage your money.