The email ping of doom

One of the most distracting things in the modern workplace is the email ping. The irritating little noise, flash of an envelope or a message popping up with the details about who has emailed you.

This is distraction at it's worse!

Even though you might decide to ignore that ping, it has stolen some of your precious attention. There's a bit of your brain wondering who has emailed you, Has something gone wrong? Is there something you need to do? What do they want?

And once that bit of your attention has gone, you'll struggle to get back on track.

Microsoft did a survey where they got their staff to do something that needed a lot of focus and attention such as coding or report writing. They then had them distracted by a one minute distraction, a phone call, a colleague stopping by their desk, an email!

Can you guess how long it took them to get back on task? To be fully focused, fully back in the zone? On average it took 15 minutes! Some were less, some were more, some never go back on task.

So every email alert that pops up really does steal your attention and the answer to that problem is to turn off the email pings. That might sound scary and terrifying to you. What if I miss an important email? I hear you ask. You won't! Because you will still be checking your email, but you'll be look when you want to, when you're ready, not when someone else wants you to.

Take the plunge and turn them off today, you won't regret it! Give yourself the gift of fully focused attention.

To turn off email notifications with Outlook:

1. Click ‘File’.
2. Click ‘Options’.
3. Click on the second tab “Mail”.
4. In the “Message Arrival” section, underneath the bit that says “when new messages arrive”,
untick all those boxes including the envelope icon.5. Click ‘OK’.

To turn off email notifications with Gmail:

1. Click ‘Settings’ in the upper right hand of Gmail.
2. In the ‘General’ tab, look for “Desktop notifications”.
3. Click “Chat notifications off” and “Mail notifications off”.

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