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"This post originally appeared on the Crew blog.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nHave you ever felt like all you do is check your e-mail? Well, you may not spend ALL your time checking your e-mail but you do spend about\u00A028 percent\u00A0of your time doing it. That translates into about 13-hours a week or\u00A0650\u00A0hours a year of e-mail checking.\r\n\r\nFor those of us who work in a job where e-mail isn\u2019t our main responsibility, checking and responding to e-mails each day can take us away from our primary work, which results in\u00A0less\u00A0productivity.\r\n\r\nIn fact, our incessant need to respond to e-mails at work is actually making us\u00A0miserable\u00A0at work, but it doesn\u2019t have to be that way. You have to reinvest in finding flow at work.\r\nE-mail and productivity\r\nChuck Klosterman, writing for\u00A0The New York Times, compared e-mail to a zombie attack\u2014you keep killing them, they keep coming. Okay, so e-mails don\u2019t actually turn us into flesh-eating-hell-beasts, but they do make us feel like we don\u2019t have total\u00A0control\u00A0over our own lives.\r\n\r\n\tWorkers switch tasks every\u00A0three minutes, mostly due to e-mail (around 36 times an hour).\r\n\tThe sheer volume of e-mails we receive makes us feel like we are out of\u00A0control.\r\n\tWe are\u00A0afraid\u00A0to use e-mail filters or other tools to help us handle our e-mail because we don\u2019t want to feel out of the loop.\r\n\r\nThat, is a recipe for unhappiness and distraction.\r\n\r\nResearchers\u00A0at the University of Chicago and Microsoft decided to look into how e-mail disrupts our work day by logging workers interactions with their computer and monitoring their tasks.\r\n\r\nSay you have a primary task, like working on a report. Then you receive an alert telling you that you have a new e-mail (that\u2019s a diversion). Each time we experience a disruption at work we go through what is called an interruption life cycle, which looks like this:\r\n\r\nWhat the researchers found was that the typical diversion caused by an e-mail was\u00A0nine minutes and 30 seconds\u00A0in length. Now that was just the time spent on the e-mail itself. After that, it still took the participants of the study another\u00A016 minutes\u00A0to resume their primary task. That\u2019s a lot of lost time.\r\n\r\nNot only does e-mail hinder our ability to accomplish the essential aspects of our workday it also\u00A0contributes\u00A0to the overall stress we feel about our job. Even going so far as to impact our ability to maintain and develop good relationships at work.\r\n\u201CEmail can be a superficial blanket that distances you from real relationships where you\u2019re really working together.\u201D \u2014Study participant\r\nWould these problems go away if people didn\u2019t have access to e-mail? Well, one\u00A0study\u00A0wanted to look into what would happen if they did just that.\r\n\r\nResearchers at the University of California, followed around 13 information workers. The study logged workers computer interactions, stress levels, and also had the workers respond to a series of questionnaires. The purpose was to find out how people would use their time if they weren\u2019t allowed access to their e-mail.\r\n\u201CWithout email, our informants focused longer on their tasks, multitasked less, and had lower stress.\u201D\u2014Researchers; Mark, Voida, &amp;amp;amp; Cardello\r\nIt\u2019s important to point out here that for these study participants, in fact in all instances above, e-mail was a secondary function or task of their employment. There are many people who respond to e-mails as part of their primary work.\r\n\r\nThe point here is to understand that we should be focusing on our primary tasks at work and when we don\u2019t, we end up distracted, less happy, and less productive. The key, no matter what your job, is to find flow.\r\nFinding your flow\r\nOur productivity largely hinges on the kind of work you are doing and how\u00A0motivated\u00A0you feel about that particular task. For us to really feel motivated and accomplished at work, we have to enter a state of deep work (or flow).\r\n\r\nCal Newport\u00A0is an author and blogger who writes about the concept of deep work. He defines it as:\r\n\u201CCognitively demanding activities that leverage our training to generate rare and valuable results, and that push our abilities to continually improve.\u201D\r\nFor Newport, the benefits of deep work are as follows:\r\n\r\n\tContinuous improvement of the\u00A0value\u00A0of your work output.\r\n\tAn increase in the total\u00A0quantity\u00A0of valuable output you produce.\r\n\tDeeper\u00A0satisfaction\u00A0at work.\r\n\r\nYou know when you feel like your brain is going to explode from how hard something is, but you just keep hacking at it until you get it? You do it because it\u2019s a rush, and a challenge, and you just know you have to finish something, and you won\u2019t even breath one single breath until you do? Then when you finally finish it and you are all like:\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nIn\u00A0psychology\u00A0this is called\u00A0flow\u2014a state of effortless concentration. We have trouble achieving it because we are usually trying to find a balance between challenge and skill. When a challenge exceeds our skill level, that breeds anxiety. When there is far too little challenge, we are bored.\r\n\r\nPositive psychologist,\u00A0Martin Selgiman, provides us with an example of how we can find flow anywhere. A bagger at a grocery store challenged themselves to make every customer smile. The goal here was not 100% success (which would be impossible) but rather to have genuine human interactions with people. We find flow when we do work that matters to us.\r\n\r\nHere are three other things you can do to help improve your chances of entering flow (thereby making the most out of your time spent at work):\r\nEliminate obstacles\r\nThere are plenty of obstacles that stand in our way of a flow state. Workplace interruptions comprise a large majority of them. The average worker experiences at least\u00A087\u00A0interruptions each day. Some advice from the\u00A0Harvard Business Review\u00A0about how to get into flow? Try not to check your e-mail until you\u2019ve accomplished the most important task of your day.\r\n\r\nIf e-mail is your most important task of the day,\u00A0respond\u00A0to e-mails that will only take one to two minutes to complete first. Set aside the more involved e-mails in an \u2018action folder\u2019 and make sure you respond to them when you can devote the right amount of time and mental energy (this actually goes for everyone).\r\nSet clear goals\r\nIf you don\u2019t know what you want to achieve you will not achieve it. I could write a dissertation on this with myself as the primary case subject. It\u2019s not enough to just have a goal in mind, you have to be as\u00A0specific\u00A0as possible about what that goal is and how you are going to achieve it.\r\n\r\nWrite down what success will look like, what failure will look like. If you want to find flow, you need to\u00A0define\u00A0these things for yourself so you can know when you achieve them.\r\nNote your progress\r\nSo much about finding flow, indeed staying motivated in general, is about taking the time to acknowledge what you have done well. We either assume other people will notice, or that it\u2019s not important enough to take time out of our schedule to say, \u2018Hey, I did pretty good on that thing damn it.\u2019\r\n\r\nEven\u00A0small wins\u00A0motivate us. Writing down and crossing off items from your\u00A0to-do\u00A0list can help you measure progress and take advantage of those small wins.\r\n\r\nSeriously, the more difficult something is, the\u00A0better\u00A0we feel about it once its completed. Challenges present us with an opportunity to learn a new skill, but they also allow us to see the fruits of our hard work.\r\n\r\nFor me, finding my flow means I\u2019m not responding to every e-mail that comes to my inbox right away. Instead, I focus on my writing and research and turn off e-mail notifications until I complete my primary work. This helps me center my focus on what really matters.\r\n\r\nWhen we find flow, our workdays seem to fly by. That\u2019s one of the many benefits of focusing on the part of your job that you find challenging and enriching. Find ways to challenge yourself, keep focused on your primary task, and stop making time for distractions.\r\n\r\nRead next:\u00A03 Gmail tricks that can save you hours every week"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2014/07/29/work-better-email-less/>