How many times a day do you check your emails? You may think it’s not a big deal to continually check your emails during your busy day but research shows it contributes to many problems. Continually checking your email has great costs including your mental and physical burnout, destroying your productivity at work and costs corporations 28 billion wasted work hours per year. When you effectively manage your email stress, you manage your mental and physical health and your productivity.
The researchers found that constantly returning emails during your business day is now called “workplace telepressure.” This new “telepressure” is a major cause of work stress and is a major health hazard. Employees felt chronically fatigued, struggled with insomnia and experienced burnout.
5 Tips for Mindfully Managing Your Email Stress.
- Disconnect from your inbox. Turn off your email alert sounds. This allows you to control when you check your emails not them orchestrating your attention.
- Manage expectations. Let your coworkers, managers, and clients know how you manage your emails to make you more productive. Tell them you check your emails every two hours but if there is an urgent need they can text or call you for an immediate response.
- Create response times. Choose time intervals during your day that work with your business to check your emails.
- Priority sorting. Select the emails that require a timely response and put other emails in appropriate files for a later response.
- Quick response. Respond to your emails with a few lines to be timely and respectful. You may respond, “I’ll get back to you.” “This is important so let’s get together about his later.”