My name’s Brydon and I’m addicted to email.

I have a long standing, ongoing battle with email. I’m happy to report I haven’t checked email today and intend to only check it twice today. It’s the intend part that’s difficult to hold up. At Brainpark we think a lot about productivity in the enterprise. Email feels like one of those areas we have far more freedom and control than we need. To that end, I’m going retro. I’m reconfiguring my email client back to the nineties.

In many ways email worked better in the days of dial up when I was paying per minute to be connected to the internet. In those days, email clients were offline most of the time and we had outboxes. Sending an email meant typing it entirely and then ‘sending’ it which put it into your outbox where it waited to be truly sent. A couple of times per day you would connect to the internet and send all the emails in your outbox while receiving all your new mail. You only did that a few times per day because it cost you real dollars.

Today I have more choice, more freedom and it’s all email all the time. My retro mode changes will be to only retrieve new email twice per day. As well, I’ll type new emails and save them to drafts in order to send out only twice per day. Why only send twice per day? It’s about expected behaviour. If I’m emailing you all day long yet only receiving your emails twice per day, you’ll start to think I’m ignoring your emails as it’s clear from my sending behaviour that I’m checking email.

Enforced Scarcity

If that doesn’t work, I’ll create a new user profile in my OS that I only use for email, twitter, etc. That way I have to explicitly login to that separate profile.

Now to take it up a notch. I’m going to pitch an experiment to the Brainpark team in Guelph. We all uninstall email, IM, twitter clients from our computers. We then setup an email booth in the office which is a single shared computer. We each create user profiles on that machine where we setup email etc. When you want to check email, you have to use that computer. Clearly only one of us can do that at a time. We’ve created scarcity of that resource as well as social pressure and awareness around usage. If I’m using email a lot today, someone in the office will notice and likely call me on it.

Hmmm, maybe we should have email chips as well? How are you dealing with email and other digital distractions?

This entry was posted on Friday, November 13th, 2009 at 10:55 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.