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Managing Distraction: How and Why to Ignore Your Inbox

Dell Technologies

Posted on behalf of Katherine Ellison, a Pulitzer-Prize winning investigative journalist, author, writing consultant and former foreign correspondent.

The problem confronts you each morning, like a squalling baby that must be fed NOW. It’s your email inbox, loaded with capital letters and exclamation marks and missives marked “URGENT.” Unlike with that baby, however, you’ll need to ignore even some of the most hysterically worded if you want to stay gainfully employed.

I’ve been paying particular attention to just these sorts of distractions for the past seven years, ever since my son, then nine, was diagnosed with ADHD. Like millions of other modern parents, I realized I shared his symptoms – a discovery that prompted me to study this increasingly common disorder for my book, “Buzz: A Year of Paying Attention.” I’ve come to believe that those of us diagnosed with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder are today’s coal mine canaries – just a bit farther down the interruption interstate everyone else is traveling.

Today’s relentless email flood could steer you away from high-value work and even out of work entirely if you don’t learn defensive strategies. That sounds obvious until you hear that a British study found that half of all information workers respond to an e-mail within 60 minutes of receipt. That’s no strategy at all, unless you consider crossing items off your colleagues’ To Do lists to be your highest priority. Taking that approach is so literally mind-numbing that the study further concluded that overdoing email can be as detrimental to your IQ as smoking weed.

Rather, manage expectations – your own and everyone elses. Train yourself not to expect that you’ll cater to every Tom, Dick and colleague’s whim. Train others to expect that you’ll handle inquiries responsibly – but not immediately. Use your Autoreply function liberally, telling senders when they can expect an answer and suggesting that they call your cell in the event of a (genuine) emergency.

There’s a reason you have that “Block Sender” feature on your email program. Use it for anyone you don’t need to tend to regularly, and check your spam file daily or weekly. Get in the habit of working in blocks of time of at least 30 minutes without checking, and increase that time as much as you can. It’s the work you complete during uninterrupted blocks that will get you promoted, not the speed with which you hit Reply. Nobody ever got fired for postponing email time in order to secure the week’s big win.

Katherine Ellison is a Pulitzer-prize winning former foreign correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers, who has also freelanced articles for publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic and Smithsonian. She is the author of five books, including Buzz, A Year of Paying Attention, a memoir about raising a son with ADHD after being diagnosed with it herself. She lives in northern California with her husband, two sons, and rescue designer dog, a bich-poo.