I am trying to improve my ability to focus on things for a long period of time. That means resist distractions. That means don’t check email.
To get a sense of how often I check email, today I kept a running count each time I checked my work email, hotmail, and gmail. Here are the results:
Work email: 17 times
Hotmail: 6 times
Gmail: 2 times
Note that these numbers would be much higher but I worked hard to resist the urge to check my email. I think that on a typical day the numbers would be twice as much (maybe more).
This is a sad state of affairs. Checking my email so often is crazy. There’s no need for this. It is a huge distraction. I can’t (nobody can) do deep work with such distractions.
I will continue to build will power to resist the urge to obsessively check email.
Have you counted the number of times that you check email in a day? Is it higher or lower than the numbers above? Let me know, please.
Diverse Thoughts 