Switching off email for productivity

The pressure to follow established cultural norms within an organisation can be strong, even if those norms are dumb and drain productive time or invade our non-work time. (And as Australia seeks to implement a right to disconnect law, it's important to remember that we all have a choice not to follow dumb cultural norms!) And one of the dumbest norms of all is to take a break from work to refresh one’s mental health and spend time with people that you love, only to dread the last two days knowing that you’ll have a thousand emails in your inbox waiting for you. I used to be the same and then I made a decision that changed everything for me. You can do the same. The last thing I wanted to do when I returned to work was to spend hours and hours reading out of date information or negating the purpose of my holiday and allowing overwhelm to immediately return. So I stopped and used the technology to my advantage. I set up a rule to send every message received during my holiday to trash. I freed up time in my first week back for people to bring me up to date - verbally - and by Tuesday I was usually all caught up. As opposed to trawling through my email day and night looking for the important messages. I ensured that people knew of my approach, so that it wasn’t a surprise that I didn’t have their email. I did this by using the text below in my out of office message. This is a cultural norm that everyone can immediately challenge. Name check someone in the comments below who would benefit from this! Copy and paste 👇 ------------- ‘Thanks so much for your email, however I’m currently on leave until xxxx. If you require assistance, please contact xxxx who is covering for me whilst I’m away. Please note that your email will be deleted. This is not because I don’t view its contents as important, but rather that I can do nothing with it, nor do I wish to return from holiday to a thousand emails, thus affecting my productive time for my first month back. Thanks for understanding (also, you should copy this approach!) [Your Name]’ -------------

How NOT to work on vacation. If you’re on vacation, I hope you’re not reading this. I hope you're off the grid, soaking in the quiet—or the joy—and letting your mind rest. But if you're still here, maybe this will help. It took me years to stop checking work emails while I was supposed to be on vacation. I used to think that staying connected would make me a better entrepreneur. More credible. More in control. That’s the credibility trap—the belief that constant work equals worth. But always being “on” comes at a cost. Chronic stress. Diminished focus. And ironically, lower productivity. Here’s what I now do to actually disconnect (rewriting my handwritten list so you can read it): 1 - Make rest a requirement, not a reward. 2 - Set clear expectations with clients and your team. 3 - Block time off on your calendar way in advance—in ink. 4 - Finish work early in the week. 5 - Ease out of work a few hours (or days) before you leave. 6 - Set your out-of-office reply. 7 - Delete your work email from your phone. 8 - Plan your return week to avoid reentry shock. 9 - Don’t pack work. 10 - Don’t plan to think about work. But if ideas come, jot them down and let them go. 11 - Close the office to open strong: clean your desk, empty your inbox, water the plants. 12 - And remember: true emergencies—rare as they are—can usually be handled by someone else. In France, we even made this a legal right: Le droit à la déconnexion—the right to disconnect. It protects your personal and family life by keeping work from bleeding into every hour of your day. So this summer, if you can, take a real break. You, your business, and your brain will thank you.

I was working with a coaching client recently, a senior guy with a crazy workload who needed to get more out of his days. We went right back to basics: We identified what time of day he does his best work - for him, it’s first thing in the morning. This is really precious time that has to be protected so that he can do the hard work that requires the most brain power. He normally gets into the office at 7am, but only has an hour or so before distractions in the form of other people, meetings, email and Teams messages arrive. So we removed all notifications from his laptop and phone. No more pop ups when a message arrives. To avoid the in-person interruptions he is now blocking out 7am to 10am every day in his calendar for deep work. (His diary was packed for the next few weeks, but we identified a date from which he is able to do this.) He is agreeing communication protocols with his team, based on those I used to use when I was at KPMG, which are: ✉️ Email - expect a response in a few days 💬 Teams / Slack messages - expect a response in a few hours 📞 If something is really urgent - pick up the phone Establishing these protocols manages everyone’s expectations and demolishes a very common default expectation that email or other messages need a quick response - most of a time they don’t, or if they do it is often because of poor planning by the sender. And to stop himself getting distracted by his own thoughts when he’s doing some deep work, he’s going to set a countdown timer on his laptop, either 25 minutes or 55 minutes, depending on what he’s doing. If he feels the urge to check email or remembers something else he has to do, he will check the timer as reminder to get back to the deep work, and he can look at the other thing once the time is up. This is just the tip of the iceberg, but these fundamentals are so effective, and I’m very excited about the really positive impact they’re going to have for him. If you could do with getting some time back in your day, I’d encourage you to give these a go too. #HighPerformance #Habits 📌 P.S. I can help your team perform better and get more time back for themselves. Productivity up, burnout risk down. Now booking into January 2024 - a great way to set your team off right for next year. If this sounds good, message me to find out more about creating an experience for your team that delivers feedback like this: ✅ "Fantastic - both the content of the presentation and the way it was delivered." ✅ "Extremely relatable content with some clear actions to take away and work on." ✅ "So much useful, practical detail with scientific backup where relevant." ✅ "Really well presented and perfect level of content." ✅ "You were brilliant - thank you!"

After YEARS, I finally admitted the truth: I was addicted to interruptions. Every email notification = immediate response required. Every phone call = must answer right now. Every colleague stopping by = drop everything to chat. I thought I was being responsive and professional. I was actually destroying my productivity. Here's what I learned the hard way: When you let yourself get interrupted every 10 minutes, you never get into deep work mode. That brief that should take 2 hours? It takes 6 hours when you're constantly switching tasks. That research project? Gets pushed to "tomorrow" for weeks. My wake-up call came when I realized: No email is so urgent it can't wait 2 hours. No phone call requires an immediate answer. People don't know if you're in court, in a deposition, or out of the office. What changed everything: • Closed my office door • Told my assistant: no interruptions for 90 minutes • Put my phone on silent • Ignored email completely The result? I got more done in 90 focused minutes than I used to accomplish in half a day. Nothing catastrophic happens when you don't respond to an email for 2 hours. The world doesn't end when you let a call go to voicemail. Your colleagues will survive if they can't interrupt you immediately. But your productivity will transform when you protect your focus time. Stop choosing to be interrupted. Your most important work deserves your undivided attention. #ProductivityTips #LawyerLife #FocusTime

Coworkers keep tapping you on the shoulder? Drop this 2-word boundary. "Focus Block" But it only works if you back it up with systems: 1️⃣ Headphones are like my office door - AirPods Pro, Sony WH-1000XM5s, or a $20 pair of construction headphones whatever kills the background noise. - I loop the same lofi playlist so folks see the cans + hear zero talk = “Max is in the zone.” 2️⃣ Zero notifications - Email, Slack, Teams, iMessage, Socials? All turned off. - Phone calls and teams calls are the only notifications that are enabled. - I also use the app "Laps" on iOS to handle blocking apps I don't want notifications from, and track my focus over time 3️⃣ Calendar armor - Focus Block #1 9:30 AM – 11:30 AM - Focus Block #2 1:30 PM – 4:00 PM - Catch-up window 4:15 PM – 4:45 PM (this is when I actually open inboxes/ IMs etc). - Status flips to Do Not Disturb so those “quick sync?” invites auto-decline 4️⃣ The polite deferral If someone still taps me on the shoulder, I typically say: “I’m in a focus block, can you give me (insert however much time is remaining) and I’ll swing by.” #deepfocus #productivity #softwareengineer

How I Stop Context Switching From Killing My Day at Amazon There were days I’d work from 9 to 5 and feel like I got nothing done. Not because I wasn’t working… But because I was switching every five minutes. Slack → email → meeting → doc → Slack again. By the end of the day, my brain felt fried. And my output? Zero. That’s when I realized: context switching isn’t just annoying. It’s productivity’s silent killer. Here’s how I fight back: 1/ Batch tasks ↳ Email twice a day ↳ Approvals in one block 2/ Theme days ↳ Mondays = planning, Tuesdays = syncs ↳ Themes reduce mental gear shifts 3/ Protect deep blocks ↳ 90 minutes, no interruptions ↳ Flow beats fragments 4/ Kill notifications ↳ Turn off Slack pings ↳ Train people to expect delayed replies 5/ Document decisions ↳ Stops rehashing ↳ Cuts cycles of back-and-forth Context switching feels like work. But it kills progress. 📬 I share focus frameworks weekly in The Weekly Sync: 👉 https://lnkd.in/e6qAwEFc What’s your best trick for fighting context switching?

Is anyone else buried in emails, slacks, texts, etc? How do you keep from getting overwhelmed? A few years ago as Decimal was just starting it's rapid growth, the shear amount of comms nearly caused me to burn out. What it nice that Decimal was growing? Yes Was I checking email, slack, texts, etc. all day every day? (especially after the kids went to bed) Yes Is that healthy or sustainable? No That's when I realized that I needed to build healthy habits around communications. Here's what I did: 1. Turned off notifications 2. Snoozed emails that could be answered later 3. Stopped checking slack and email during meetings 4. Scheduled comms time twice each day to keep up with my inbox and slack. 5. Organized my inbox into To-Do, Waiting for Some, and Archive (Thanks to the "Great CEO Within" book) Am I perfect? Nope Does it help? Absolutely I've always found that building habits helps every time. What do you do to keep from getting overwhelmed by comms?

There was a time when getting my inbox to zero was an actual goal of mine. It was specific, it was measurable, it was attainable, it felt relevant (getting back to people quickly is important to me), and it was time-bound. But it was a terrible goal. Truly terrible. One that with the benefit of hindsight I can say I never should have had. A study by the University of California, Irvine found that it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get yourself back on track after being interrupted. TWENTY THREE MINUTES! And every ding of an email is just that, a distraction, even if it's an important one. If you haven't become intentional about time blocking your day, try this to get started with an easy (but significant!) step. Ready? Here goes. Turn off your email. Right now. That's it! You can do it! You really can :) Then plan out 30 minutes in the morning, mid-day, and the end of the day to check emails. You'll be able to get back to everyone within just a few hours and not only will you have time to think, to plan, to do deep work that simply cannot happen when it takes 23 minutes to get back on track every time an email comes in, you may even find that responding to them all at once in blocks is a lot more efficient in an of itself. What are your thoughts on this? Tell me when you have your time blocked to reply to LI messages :). #intentionality #intentionalityinbusiness #professionaldevelopment #timemanagement #timemanagementtools #timeblocking #performanceimprovement