I’ve decided..

..to stop reading e-mails after weekday work hours as part of an overall system of boundaries. So, if there’s a chance you’re reading this because you clicked on a hyperlink included in an auto-responder, there’s good news and bad news.

The good news is: that e-mail will be read on the next business day that I am in the office.

The bad news: you might be irritated because I’m not responding tonight.

“Dean, you’ll be behind the times! How are you going to survive in this 24/7 world?”

In that question lies exactly the problem. We’re over-notified, overly-accessible, overly-stimulated and we’ve gaslighted ourselves into thinking it is normal. We might as well just put the neural net hat on and be wired into the net.

So, why am I doing this?

In my experience, I’ve found that looking at e-mails after-hours allows for anxiety to creep in about things that I can’t do anything about until the morning anyhow. Then, you read the e-mail in the morning a second time … and then maybe a third .. and then, well, you get the picture. It’s totally inefficient and ineffective.

And let’s address the elephant in the room:

I’m addicted to checking my e-mail.

There’s a chance you are, too. Don’t kid yourself.

Here’s a surefire way to check-in on this: do you catch yourself checking e-mail involuntarily? You know what I mean if you do. There are occasions where I’ll just check my e-mail for no good reason at all other than the phone was in my hand and my fingers just automatically went to it. It’s your brain looking for another hit of dopamine.

Being real-time with e-mail actually flies in the face of the killer application of e-mail: it’s asynchronous! (Thank you, Seth Godin, for reminding me of this during your podcast). With e-mail, you can send/receive any time you want in any batch that you’d like.

I’ve read that a lot of people set specific times in the day to check their e-mails. Do you do this? I’d love to hear from you.

It sounds very focused and practical but I’m not there yet. The story I tell myself is that I have fires that need me to be pseudo-real-time during the day. But who knows? I’m going to start with this simple framework:

I’m going to stop checking my work e-mails after hours.

The thing I’m most excited about this boundary is that it allows for me to create a framework for other boundaries that can piggyback on it. Like, the fact that I don’t read as many books as I’d like to. So, I’m going to start a game. Whenever I have the urge to check e-mail, I’m going to read a chapter in the book I’m reading. If I had to bet I’d say that this going to be a net positive result.

Isn’t that weird that I started that paragraph with “I’m so excited” about a constraint I’ve placed on myself? It’s a recurring thing I’ve noticed. When I create barrier walls for myself that allows for me to play within a finite space, it is somehow relieving.

The absence of options can feel more like freedom than the abundance of them.

So, who is with me? I’m going to be setting an auto-responder today, indefinitely. If you’re looking to place a digital boundary send me an e-mail and let me know. I’d love to support you, just please take note that, depending on when you send it, I may not get to it until tomorrow.