Check Email MORE Regularly

Time, again, to play the Contrarian.

Much talk these days about how email is a huge time-management saboteur. As such, many experts are recommending that we only check emails twice/day ... to minimize our interruptions. But I think that's a pretty bad idea. Here's why:

1. Checking for emails only twice a day will likely result in an inability to keep our inbox current. The resultant Inbox Overload, which I believe is one of the main triggers of workplace overwhelm and procrastination, is a centerpiece of poor time management.
2. Checking for emails only twice a day will likely result in us missing important, time-sensitive, communications that, quite possibly, could save us from a LOT of unnecessary make-work ... if we only knew that priorities had changed ... before we did all that work we just did.
3. Checking for emails only twice a day signals to your coworkers that you don't really care much about what they have to say. Being so disrespectful (intentionally or not) is hardly a smart move for anyone who has to depend on collaboration, teamwork, and cooperation to get things done.
4. Checking for emails only twice a day undermines our cogitation, that is our thoroughly thinking things through before reacting or responding to them. You have to know it's out there before you can even start to think about it.
5. Checking for emails only twice a day makes you a bottleneck which means that an increasing amount of what you have to do will be under increasingly tighter time frames.
6. Checking for emails only twice a day prevents us from productively using our in-between moments. Consider:

• Time you loose while waiting for meetings to officially begin.

  Time you loose while waiting for meetings to officially end.

  Time you loose while waiting on conference calls for others to finish discussing what doesn't involve, or impact upon, you.

  Time you loose while waiting for your boss to finish that umpteenth phone call interruption.

These in-between moments are absolutely ideal for quickly checking your email and getting a meaningful leg-up on reading through some of those FYIs you typically ignore, or replying to the easy-peasy requests you know are buried in there somewhere, or previewing (so you can start cogitatating on) the more complex ones that probably just arrived. Go for it I say.

Can checking email too frequently become a time management problem? Sure. But because of the reasons just stated, I think checking your email too INfrequently creates even more time management problems than it solves.