I am going to be honest and admit that I am guilty of checking my emails late at night, over the weekend and as the first thing in the morning when I wake up.
I used to be good at this thing called work-life balance but recently I have been failing.
With my line of work, freelance writing, I always feel like I need to be online, ready to respond and on the look out for new opportunities. And this urge to check my email has recently become normalized to the extent that the line between work and my social life is blurry, there’s no boundaries, no rest.
But this always leads to burn out so me having realised where I am heading with this habit have decided to put in place 3 techniques that will enhance my relationship with email.
And here they are:
Clock out and freeze the app
Only check emails during work time and when you are done with work, freeze the apps. Freezing the apps puts them out of sight, and so maybe they will be out of mind too as a result. But train yourself to clock out after work, most of the times the work can wait and it will find you. Your mind needs rest so give it to start the next work day full of energy, so rest.
Set an automated response
If you are like me and are scared of losing clients, you can set an automatic response for after work hours that basically notify your clients or whoever emails you that you have seen the email and will work on it tomorrow. This auto response will give you peace, if you are anything like me and aways feel the urge to quickly respond to emails.
Unsubscribe and remove notifications
I think having subscription to services you don’t need and having notifications for new emails is a bad combination. You can unsubscribe to services or news you no longer want to hear, nd turn off notifications after work hours or turn off notifications from email permanently, so that you can only be able to see your emails when you log in which is work hours.
Hopefully with these 3 techniques in place we can be fully present in our social lives and fully attentive at work and hence finding the balance, but more importantly avoid burn out which is affecting so many workers as proved by this Indeed survey pre-covid where 43 percent of people said they are suffering from it.
Further reading:
