Have you ever felt like you were actually addicted to your email?
ADD business owners rely heavily on email. It keeps you in contact with your customers, clients, and vendors, alerts you to problems in your organization, and every once in a while it provides you with a great piece of news, like a new sale.
But email is also a very dangerous distraction for people with ADD, especially business owners, who are often under so much pressure that any distraction is a welcome one.
If you've ever felt that you are a slave to your email -- or if your family has ever threatened to run over your computer -- then you'll find this fantastic post at Mind Hacks very interesting.
It suggests that our "email addictions" are actually the result of behavioral reinforcement. Because every once in a while, and almost completely unpredictably, we get a fantastic reward from checking our email. Which makes us want to check it all the time in anticipation of that reward.
The post offers many ideas about how to stop this addiction, but stops short at recommending one in particular. Perhaps not checking email as often? Perhaps checking it all the time? Perhaps making it harder to check your email when you want to? Perhaps rewarding the opposite behavior?
Of course, the follow up question to all of these is "But how???"
Personally, I find that there are times in the day when I have to shut down my email program altogether. This doesn't last long, but sometimes just one hour of uninterrupted work time is all I need. The rest of the time, I don't mind having email open and letting the emails flow in.
I also find that shutting down my computer at the end of the day prevents me from running into the home office to check email in the evening. And my partner has put her foot down when it comes to getting a Blackberry. Her exact words were "Oh no! If you get a Blackberry I'll never be able to have a conversation with you again!"
She's probably right.
