Email Detox: Can It Really Be A Thing?
If dealing with email is as stressful and creatively draining for you as it is for me, then you have been temped to just say "f*ck it" and turn off the whole damn thing. While my most recent post was all about how to manage an overwhelming email box, in this post I want to explore the idea of going on an email detox. An email detox as I am defining it, is not using email at all for an extended period of time.
Now I know what you are thinking. No way in today's email-dependent must-have-an-answer-now world could you possibly think of turning off your email. If social media MOFO is a habit of guilty pleasure, email isn't quite so optional. We rely on it for everything from work correspondence, to communicating with our health care teams, to confirming e-commerce transactions. Just try moving through the day not being asked once for your email. I dare you.
And then there is the simple fact of the increased productivity and efficiency that email has brought to our lives. For example, instead of having to call six different members of my board of directors, I can email all of them at once with all the same exact information. If phone beepers and fax machines of years ago accelerated our methods of communication, email ramped it up to light speed. That's hard to imagine living without.
But, with that said, on occasion, one life-strategy that I find helpful to play out is hypothetical "what-if" scenarios in my imagination. So applying that to this email detox idea, these are the questions that come to my mind: What would really happen if your email address went silent for awhile? Who would be mad? What would you miss? Would it be the end of the world? What could you maybe learn about yourself in the time that you weren't spending obsessing over your email?
Of course I don't know for sure, but I like to believe that no doomsday apocalyptic consequences would happen if you edited your email signature to read "this is the last email you will be getting from me for a month." The world would keep on spinning. Albeit with maybe a few more phone calls in your life. Because I am not so unrealistic to think you can crawl under a rock. I know you still need to have a way to communicate issues of importance with the people in your professional and personal life.
And also to be clear, just because you stop engaging in email, won't keep it from filling your inbox. You might get less one-on-one correspondence with specific requests. But promotional emails, newsletter subscriptions and reminders of all types will still be sent to you. The idea of an email detox isn't about what your email does, it is about how you interact with it. The level of priority that you give email in your daily routine, that is harming your creative life, your mental health, and maybe even your physical health.
An Email Detox Baby-Step
If you aren't ready to take the big plunge and do a full-on email detox, try this instead. Next time you go on a planned vacation, set and communicate the expectation that all the emails that come in while you are away will NOT be read. Put in your away message who is covering for you, and perhaps an alternate form of communication for emergencies only. But also make it clear that whoever is generating that email is really wasting their time, because you make the declaration ahead of time that it will never even get read, to say anything of a getting a reply.
When you try this self-detonating email announcement while away for a few weeks on vacation, and you realize that the world doesn't come grinding to a halt and that the sky doesn't fall, perhaps it will give you the confidence to do a longer detox, and finally put the role of email in your life to a more healthy and balanced perspective.
The bottom line is, when you take control of your time, and reframe the task of email management from one of an obligation to a choice, suddenly feelings of empowerment greatly increases, and hopefully, levels of stress and anxiety diminish. It's not human instinct for people to willingly choose to do stressful things. That is inherently part of what makes them stressful, or at the very least unpleasant.
I know I may never love dealing with email. Now being middle aged, I remember many years of life where email didn't even exist. And I was just as happy, fulfilled and content (and granted younger). Indeed, saying goodbye to email in a detox may not be the only answer. It may not even be the best answer. But I am confident that unplugging for awhile will restore a sense of balance that your ever-filling inbox has been robbing you of, in ways you didn't even realize until you didn't have to hit "reply."
“No one on their deathbed ever wished they had spent more time on the computer.”
