Welcome to the Tuesday Time-Wasting Tip-off, a weekly series of tip-offs that aim to boost your productivity, give you back your precious time and show you how to over-come procrastination and all of it done in sweet and tasty, bite-size chunks.

Time wasting is killing your productivity , who would have thought it! Watch closely, see? Right there? You just lost another valuable, irreplaceable minute in the small crevices of your life. If there were some magical way to completely replay your past 30 days, you would be astounded by the amount of time you waste doing nothing at all. You would be rendered speechless at the mental distractions you foist on yourself. And if you could compare your last 30 days to someone who is not wasting time you would be stunned by how much more productive they are. Unfortunately, there is not, but there are ways you can identify lost moments and retrieve them from down the back of life’s couch where all small things gather, waiting, for that day when they will be rediscovered by an inquisitive set of fingers.

Much of my working life is spent in front of a computer; I write documents, read contracts, respond to email and a variety of other tasks. The computer is the hub of my daily activity and most knowledge workers spend their days just like this too, sat in front of a computer of some description, re-arranging pixels on a glowing display in an effort to make them interesting enough so that other people will pay for them.

When you spend that much time using a computer, it is very easy to become sidetracked. Through various scientific studies carried out by other people, including informal reviews around the office at my video game development company, coupled with decades of my own personal experience as an entrepreneur, I can emphatically state that it takes upwards of 15 minutes to become clearly focused on a non-rote, highly cognitive task requiring concentration and creativity. The slightest interruption, distraction or stray thought can render hours of your life utterly spent.

There are huge gains to be made by making simple changes in small areas of your life. Just as it is with software applications such as your word processor, 90% of the time is spent executing only 10% of the program code, the same is true with your life. A good 90% of your day or week is spent doing the same wasteful, low-value activities that disrupt your mental flow and distract you from what is important to you. Optimise that 10% and you will gain back untold hours over the course of a week, month or year. And just like with software, the parts of the application that are never executed by the computer are the most optimal of all.

For the next several weeks, I will be writing one tip-off every Tuesday and answering questions on how to overcome the mental roadblocks we throw out there that prevent us from leading the best life we can. In the next post is the first of what I aim to be many posts in an on-going series that will help you to optimize your life by streamlining, speeding up or completely eliminating worthless, low-value activities that cause the grand picture of your life to get lost in the details.

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Welcome to the first Tuesday Time-Wasting Tip-off, this week, the distraction of just one aspect of email.

Disable Your Email Alerts

A huge time sink. We all love email. Some days it just seems I live in the Inbox of Microsoft Outlook where I have to respond to a few dozen business emails and be in constant contact with a geographically dispersed group of people. Email can be an insidious productivity killer as it leads us to believe we are making industrious use of our time when we answer 20, 30, 50 or even 100 emails in a day. Much has been written about being more productive with your email or stopping it from becoming a huge time sink. I do not want to belabour the valid points that others have raise but there are some things you can do which might not be so obvious to prevent email from becoming a complete distraction.

Turn off your email received alert right now, by default Microsoft Outloook, the email package I use and the package of choice for most businesses, will announce you have new mail as soon as it arrives. Microsoft killed off the Office Assistant Clippy and all the other little avatars in Microsoft Office because they presented a huge distraction to users and were not particularly helpful to boot. The new mail alert needs to go the way of those dodos too.

If you spend your days hovering over every missive that is dispatched to you and feel the need to read or answer it the moment that it arrives, you should seek serious help in your time management skills. Until the day arrives that Microsoft disables this feature by default, I strongly suggest you turn off your email received alert in Outlook or any other email application you utilise. You do not need widgets on your desktop or cell phone either that alert you to new email. Unless you work in a rapid response, customer service department that depends on email as one of the communications channels you just do not need to be that distracted. Oh, and if you are responsible for monitoring the World of Warcraft servers and rebooting them when they need it and receive email alerts to that fact, you should ignore this advice. Just saying…

Email alerts are the near ultimate Pavlov experience topped only by an eBay outbid signal or Amazon Goldbox notice for their potential to distract. Alerts of just about any kind are a ridiculously flawed user interface practice and the final word in disruptive software[1]. One moment you are having a deep thought, utterly subsumed in your task, and then along comes your email client to announce you have new messages that demand an answer right now. Even worse, those little pieces of badly written communication are often not even relevant to your current task.

If you are a knowledge worker, such as an artist or programmer, and you work for someone who insists that you continuously monitor your email for their latest, deeply fascinating communiqué and respond within minutes, your best option is to talk to them.

Sit down for a one-on-one chat with the person about how your job requires large uninterrupted blocks of time for concentrating on your assigned tasks. Inform the person politely but firmly that checking email too often absolutely kills your productivity, preventing you from focusing on the work that you need to do.

Many jobs we do throughout the day require large blocks of time to concentrate and not everyone needs to be at the beck and call of someone every minute of the day. Should the person you are confronting about the email issue insist that you be constantly available whilst trying to do your most creative work requiring concentration, I suggest you start contemplating a new job. The person making demands of you to check your email frequently respects neither your time nor the work you produce, no matter how much they may protest to the contrary. Do you really want to work for someone like that?

I check my email at most twice a day, and that is still once more than necessary for my job. It has to be a very rare day when I am checking more often than that. I check my email as the first thing I do when I get in to the office, and I check it again towards the end of my waking day, just in case there is a communication that requires a response be sent before the next morning. Only checking two times a day allows me to get large blocks of concentrated time to work on projects for my company. My day is already filled with distraction and disruption so minimising and streamlining where I can, in this case, my email handling procedure, can really add up over the course of a month to save me hours I can use working on other projects.

By informing and educating people I work with that I only check my email twice a day it sets an expectation that they will not receive an immediate response from me. I find that generally one of two things happen, either the person refrains from contacting me for completely trivial issues or they personally interrupt me in a face-to-face communication. This latter problem is a topic for a different article.

Turn off email alerts, educate the people around you, check your email only twice a day, recover time to focus on what is important.

[1] And not disruptive in a good way either.

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