Once you train yourself to handle key communications first thing in the morning, you will have the discipline to avoid spending mental energy on the time-wasters. The more you exercise willpower, the stronger your self-control will become. Tierney also says that willpower is comparable to resistance training. Perhaps you won’t have weighty replies to write every day, but when you do, the morning is a great time to address them. Answering the tricky ones requires willpower and you have the most of it in the morning, before you have depleted it dealing with other challenges. According to Tierney, “You only have a finite amount as you go through the day, so you should be careful to conserve it and try to save it for the emergencies.” How does this apply to emails? It’s easy to put off answering them if the responses require research or a long reply. Baumeister and John Tierney uphold willpower as one of the greatest human feats. What a psychologist and a science writer found out about the effects of willpower may surprise you. Interestingly, personality also influenced how pressured people felt. If you check your account in the morning, handle the most important messages right away, and then close the app, you might find that you stay on top of your emails without feeling overwhelmed. Though checking email at the beginning and end of the day had the strongest correlation with email stress, the report suggested turning off automatic notifications of new messages. In Germany, the problem became so concerning that the minister of employment began entertaining “anti-stress” legislation to prohibit companies from contacting employees outside of business hours in non-emergency situations. Employees who receive emails on their mobile devices via apps are even more stressed. If someone needs your reply to progress, you can help out your team productivity by doing your part as soon as possible.Īccording to an article in The Guardian, London researchers from Future Work Centre reported that workers feel pressured from constant streams of demanding emails. A morning review of emails prevents you from holding up others. If you wait too late for an urgent email, you might miss an opportunity or not have enough time to meet a deadline. If you read your emails early, you have time to react. For real emergencies, they can call you on the telephone. They will see that you are too busy to be at their beck and call, but you will get back to them in due time. Eventually, your frequent contacts will become familiar with your routine. That’s a reasonable time frame that gives you time to answer properly. If your custom is to reply to emails in the morning, you can respond within twenty-four hours. However, when they receive a thoughtful reply, they might learn to appreciate your diligence. But isn’t patience a virtue? When you don’t reply instantly, you might irritate others at first. Has anyone ever called you or sent you a message asking if you got their email that they sent five minutes ago? In today’s world of technology, people want things fast. I realized that if I finally wanted to vanquish those messages straggling at the bottom of my inbox, what I needed most wasn’t simply time to respond it was the willpower and discernment to make good judgments and respond accordingly.” She recommends setting aside twenty-minute periods throughout the day to handle email correspondence. Lifehacker reports the personal experience of Harvard Business Review contributor Dorie Clark: “Pushing email correspondence to the end of the day, I found that I consistently avoided answering certain messages because they required hard choices that my brain found taxing. The biggest reason to check your email in the morning is simply to get it out of the way. Do you want to lose the bliss that accompanies ignorance? On the other hand, just as many experts will tell you to check your email at the beginning of the day. If you add them to your plate, you will be distracted from the important things already on your to-do list. For starters, the requests in your email aren’t on your agenda of “things to do” yet. She told The Huffington Post that if you give in to the temptation, “you will never recover.” Personal development writer Sid Savara gives seven reasons not to check it. Time management consultant Julie Morgenstern wrote a whole book about it. Do not check your email! Plenty of people with fancy credentials will tell you to avoid your email at all costs in the morning.
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