Email how to let go of anxiety and be more productive

Email how to let go of anxiety and be more productiveEmail how to let go of anxiety and be more productiveDo you ever feel like your schmelzglaslele is running your life?Laddersspoke with Jocelyn K. Glei, the author of Unsubscribe, about why email causes anxiety and how we can rethink our approach to it to be less stressed and more productive.Ladders What dont we understand about email? Glei Email is still peoples number one distraction at work, but weve become so inured to it that we dont think about it in a productive way.We are all still hanging on to this idea of inbox zero. Right after Merlin Mann coined the phrase in 2007, the first iPhone was launched. All of a sudden, email could follow us everywhere. Today, inbox zero isnt relevant to volume of email we receive.We live in a world where anyone who has access to the Internet has access to you. We can all Google someone, find their email address, and show up in their inbox uninvited to ask them to do something.We have to shift the way we think about email and letgo of theidea of inbox zero. If we want to do work thats actually meaningful to us, we have to say no to some opportunities so we can say yes to our priorities.Why are we so addicted to email? Email is like a slot machine. Most of the time when you pull the lever, its a requestfrom your boss asking or a homilie from an angry client. But every once in a while, you pull the lever, and its something great an email from a long-lost friend or an invitation to speak at a conference.Those random rewards mixed in with all the junk makes you want to keep checking you email again and again because it activates aprimal seeking mechanism in your brain.This is also true of services such asSlack, Twitter, text messages, and Instagram.You have to be really clear about yourgoals so that yourenot sucked into this black hole of busy work.One thing I do is sit down every three months and identify the two or three goals that are really going to help me move the needl e in my career. Even small acts like making your to-do listthe night before can make it easier to resist those random rewards or prioritize them.Can services like Slack replace email? I dont think Slack is an alternative to email. Slack is meant for real-time communication and collaboration. Its excellent for that specific purpose, whereas email is intended for more asynchronous communication.What happens is that we get confused about when we should use whichtool. For example, we send people emails and expect them to respond immediately.We need ahigher level of consciousness to choosewhich communication mode is appropriate to the schrift of message we want to communicate. Its takes a lot of effort.Why does email make us anxious? Daniel Goldman, who created the concept of emotional intelligence, found that theres aninnate negativity bias to how people react to email. In between the writing and receiving, the emailgets downgraded a positivity notch.For example, if I feel good about se ndinganemail, youll feel neutral when you receive it. If I feel neutral when I send it, youll feel negative. And if I feel negative when I send it, youre probably going to feel distressed.The social feedback loop is missing. Tone of voice, facial expressions, and hand gestures shade how you process what someone is saying. In the absence of that,we tend to assume the worst.Negativity biasis a powerful concept in emphasizing why emails can make us so upset. It also shows why its important to put in effort when youre crafting emails to make sure theywill be received in the emotional register that you intend them.Theres also a cultural concept of askers versus guessers. If youre in an ask culture, youre taught to ask for something with the understanding that the other person can say no. If youre in a guess culture, youre trained to only ask for something if you think its very likely theyll say yes.When askers confront guessers, they run into problems. If a guesser gets an email from an asker, they guesserassumes theyre expectedto say yes. This conflictcauses a lot of anxiety.For me, understanding that concept made feel that I had more freedom to make a judgment for myself. Now I feel more empowered about only saying yes to the requeststhat align with what I want to accomplish.What can we do to reduce email anxiety? One of the problems of emails is that its a black box. You dont know how the other person is reacting.When you receive an email, you tend to either do the request, which can make you feel anxious because its interrupting other things you have to do,or put it off, which can make youfeel anxious because you know the otherperson wants a reply.Rather than doing either of those things, make a habit of letting the other personknow that you got their emailand its on your radar. These expectation-setting replies let people know where theirrequest fits within your schedule.This way, theycan stop feeling anxious about whether theyre going to get a reply, and you canreassert control over your schedule.You can also shift to a batch-processing approach. Rather than reacting in a notification-driven way, where youre constantly multi-tasking, set aside a few times a day to focus 100% on your email and attempt to ignore it the rest of the time.Research has shown that the more frequently you check your email, the more stressed you feel. People who process their email in batches are more productive, less stressed, and happier.