Last Thursday was No Email Day in ERG, the bit of the Cabinet Office GDS sits in. It's easy to mock such an initiative, but I thought it was great.
There is too much email in your life.
Whenever email goes down, or there's a powercut like there was when I was still at w+k, people are delighted to have the chance to stop emailing and get back to working. Here's what Neil wrote during the famous powercuts of 2010.
"It's amazing just how much extra time you have when there's no email."
It's easy to romanticise this too, clearly no email at all would be a massive pain in the arse. But less would be good. And mostly the problem is because we tend to use email as a task list rather than a messaging service. We should stop doing that.
Luckily GDS is already pretty light on email, there's certainly less than anywhere else I've worked. This is partly becuase the boss encourages us to "publish not send" and partly because we believe in sticking stuff on the wall.
Last Thursday I set an auto reply to say I wasn't looking at email all day and to call or come and find me instead. Worked a treat. I'm going to do it again this week. Maybe it will become A Thing and we'll all start to look at Thursdays differently, and more importantly start to use Thursdays differently.
Agree completely. I set up an auto reply explaining that my email was accessed from a shared workstation and would be checked between 8.30 and 9.00 in the morning. Anything urgent outside of this time would require a phone call.
It was one of the most productive things I did. People soon got used to the idea and it meant I could draw up a to-do at 9.00am and then not worry about email for the rest of the day.
There can be an over-reliance on email checking that makes people think being busy is the same as being productive.
Posted by: AndrewLey | Apr 30, 2013 at 21:47
People suppress everything that is why we are a society that is addicted to all things you’ve listed and worst of all “pain killers”. It takes Courage to live…. Courage recognize ones flaws and want to self improve. It takes courage to face our own conflicts. Through living vulnerable you actual being to truly live…
http://essayswriters.org/academic-writing/
Posted by: James Parker | May 15, 2013 at 09:33