Have you ever felt like all you do is check your email?
You have to reinvest in finding flowa deep state of focus.
This post originally appeared on theCrew blog.
That translates into about 13-hours a week or650hours a year of email checking.
Workers switch tasks every3 minutes, mostly due to email (around 36 times an hour).
The sheer volume of emails we receive makes us feel like we are out ofcontrol.
That is a recipe for unhappiness and distraction.
Say you have a primary task, like working on a report.
Then you receive an alert telling you that you have a new email (that’s a diversion).
Now that was just the time spent on the email itself.
After that, it still took the participants of the study another16 minutesto resume their primary task.
That’s a lot of lost time.
Even going so far as to impact our ability to maintain and develop good relationships at work.
Study participant
Would these problems go away if people didn’t have access to email?
Well, onestudywanted to look into what would happen if they did just that.
Researchers at the University of California followed around 13 information workers.
There are many people who respond to emails as part of their primary work.
The key, no matter what your job, is to find flow.
Cal Newportis an author and blogger who writes about the concept of deep work.
For Newport, the benefits of deep work are as follows:
Continuous improvement of thevalueof your work output.
An increase in the totalquantityof valuable output you produce.
Then when you finally finish it you feel a sense of pride and satisfaction.
Inpsychologythis is sometimes calledflowa state of effortless concentration.
When a challenge exceeds our skill level, that breeds anxiety and frustration.
When there is too little challenge, we are bored.
Positive psychologist,Martin Selgiman, provides us with an example of how we can find flow anywhere.
A bagger at a grocery store challenged themselves to make every customer smile.
We find flow when we do work that matters to us.
Eliminate Obstacles
There are plenty of obstacles that stand in our way of a flow state.
Workplace interruptions comprise a large majority of them.
The average worker experiences at least87interruptions each day.
I could write a dissertation on this with myself as the primary case subject.
Write down what success will look like, what failure will look like.
Seriously, the more difficult something is, thebetterwe feel about it once its completed.
This helps me center my focus on what really matters.
When we find flow, our workdays seem to fly by.
Find ways to challenge yourself, keep focused on your primary task, and stop making time for distractions.
The Key To Better Work?
Image adapted fromdeviyanthi79,2(Shutterstock),ASR_STOCK(Shutterstock).
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