I am the woman who did not check her email...and lived. Part 1 of 5 Keeping Work In Its Place
I remember my first job with a company-assigned email account. I was working as a research librarian. One day, I was in the book stacks of the library and I heard bing!
“Oh! Email! I’ll go see!"
I climbed down the ladder. I thought to myself "Oh how exciting! I have an email account and something must be important. My workplace values me!" I went over to my computer to read the email.
“The back parking lot will be paved Friday. Park somewhere else.”
Oh, well, OK, I’ll try to remember that.
Back to the stacks.
A few minutes later, I’m moving around these huge scientific journal volumes, breaking a sweat, and I hear...bing!
“Oh! Email! I’ll go see!”
Down the ladder again and over to my computer.
“Fridge cleaning is tomorrow for the second floor. Any food still there is getting thrown out.”
Oh. I don’t use the 2nd floor fridges.
I went back to the stacks.
The 3rd bing I didn’t leave the ladder.
And I lived.
I am the woman who did not check her email and lived.
This article prompted me to write this, Defending a Teacher's Right To Disconnect, but I'm writing much more broadly...to everyone tethered to our digital realities and everywhere I talk about email, I do include messengers, WhatsApps, Discord 1:1s, and all forms of push notifications. I'm also going to write stories as I get much more interaction with stories than facts.
After that refusing-to-climb-down-the-ladder again moment, I have had a few more moments to shape my philosophy about keeping work in its proper place. So these series of articles will cover emails, working 5 days a week, trust, and forgiveness. We'll talk about fear, worst case scenarios, and the dread of education. Lots to cover! Here we go!
When I had my first job with an assigned laptop, I saw the little pop-up when a new email arrived. I also heard that bing again...my old nemesis. Given that I had witnessed how personally embarrassing it is to read someone else’s email when they are screen sharing, I realized that those notifications were distractions, not helpers. Those notifications and that bing were the first things that I turned OFF on that laptop.
Lesson 1: Urgent Does Not Equal Important
Around this time, I also started reading The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. True disclosure: I only got to Habit 4. I'll admit that I'm not that effective.
But I remember the huge impact of learning to separate urgent from important. The Navy actually taught this tip in a very literal way to naval families. Before we went through our first deployment (families with a the service member out to sea for 6 months), the Navy offered personal safety training. One tip they gave us was:
When the doorbell rings, don’t open the door. Talk through it.
They explained that generations of Americans were taught by our parents to open to the door to people on the other side. Counter to that, the Navy taught that you don’t have to open the door...and actually don’t open the door. That’s where your problems will begin. No salesperson or attacker can do a thing to you from the other side of a locked door. Think it's impolite? It will be perceived that way, yes. Too bad. The good guys won't mind, they'll get over it. You have to get over the feeling of not opening the door. It’s better to be perceived as impolite than to explain to the State Trooper how you opened the door to your attacker.
So all kinds of signals that we take as urgent: ringing phone, doorbell, ding of email, etc. need to be re-assessed. Incoming signals can be re-categorized. Urgent is not the same thing as important. Many urgent things can be completely put off to a later time, a different format, or re-categorized as not important at all.
- Ringing phones become voice mails.
- Doorbells become 'they'll come back later'.
- Email dings keep the email as unread in your inbox.
You reallocate them from Category 1 (Urgent/Important) to Category 3 (Urgent/Not Important) where those items belong.
Image source: https://sidsavara.com/coveys-time-management-matrix-illustrated/
Kitchen fires and crying babies, should, of course, be addressed.
By the way, I have worked with many parents who at this moment have pushed back on my leadership where I have encouraged them to turn the ringer down or off or to not answer a ringing phone because “It might be my kid.” I respect this concern but I realize it comes with 2 caveats:
1) It is assumed that the child does have a way of communicating via phone back to the parent (not all children have access to a phone and some children are too young to use one).
2) It assumes that the message from the child to the parent is of a dire nature. Not all child-to-parent messages are of this type. Actually, very few...are.
So I have a response for you!
#1. Caller ID. You are free to glance at your phone and see who is calling you. Caller ID lets you allocate the incoming "urgent" information where it belongs. If you’d like to stop work to tend to your children, you won’t get any complaints from me. Actually, if you work to distraction and don’t pay attention to your kids, you will get in trouble with me, but that conversation is for another time.
#2 Children did and have survived generations without phones. Sorry, it’s just true. Just because we have phones doesn't mean they dominate our lives. I once witnessed a 70 year old father hustle to pick up the phone because he thought his 40 year old son might be calling.
Yeah.
That father needs a break. Seriously.
So the moral of the story is to remember that data does not arrive without meaning. We ascribe it meaning. If you treat your messenger, email, ringing phone, or ringing doorbell as all-important in your life, it will be. It has become your god.
If you re-ascribe it to a place of "I will pay attention to you when I choose to do so", you will have started to tame to monster.
My next 4 articles in this series that I will come back and link here will be:
Article 2: You Replied Too Quickly!
Article 3: I'm Going Camping
Article 4: 6 Days A Week
Article 5: Measuring Remote Team Productivity or When It All Goes Wrong
#KeepWorkInItsPlace #RemoteWork #TimeManagement #SelfControl #UrgentIsNotTheSameAsImportant #7Habits #StephenCovey #TurnOffYourEmailNotifications #TeachersAreNotAlwaysOn #EducationIsAMonster
This article originally posted to LinkedIn on September 27, 2021
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-am-woman-who-did-check-her-emailand-lived-heather-dodds