We often suggest that a good way to protect your ability to focus, and therefore increase your productivity, is to turn off new email alerts. You know the ones: every time somebody emails you, you get a little pop-up message on your screen.

The temptation is to read the new email straightaway, taking you away from what you were working on, which might well have been more important. Even if you leave reading the email until later, the alert itself has pulled your focus away from what you were working on. This fracturing of your attention every time you receive an email adds up to a lot of lost time and focus over the course of a day, a week or (if you really want to scare yourself) a month.

By keeping new email alerts switched on you're saying every new email could be more important than anything else you might be working on. And therefore you need to know about each one immediately.

Every time somebody emails you, and let's face it some people are pretty indiscriminate when it comes to sending email, with alerts switched on it's like a shepherd's crook appearing from off-screen, looping around your neck and yanking you away from what you were working on.

In some circumstances, this could be the right balance to strike. For example, if you're working in a nuclear missile silo, you're probably not going to be turning off the alerts. And that's fine. After all, an alert is the state of being watchful for possible danger. But if you're in the kind of role where it's okay for you to be in a meeting for an hour without access to email, if you're in the kind of role where it's okay for you to be out for lunch for half an hour without access to email, then you're probably also in the kind of role where you can switch off new email alerts. Great. Switch them off.

You take charge of deciding how frequently you’re going to look at your new emails, rather than handing over that decision to every single person with access to your email address. Even if you feel that it would be sensible to look every half an hour, that's won you half an hour of unfractured attention each time.

There's a lot to be said for managing people's expectations for how quickly you respond to email. If at all possible, I recommend treating email more like post (mail) than a ringing phone. Email's asynchronicity (good word, huh?) is one of its strengths. If your correspondent needs real-time communication with you they can pick up the phone.

When I talk about this in training sessions I often hear variations on the following: "Gee Richard, I'd love to turn off those new email alerts, except I can't risk missing an email from my boss/spouse/lawyer/other important person". Fair point. If you really, genuinely need to know the second that person emails you. If you really, genuinely can't leave it until the next time you look at your inbox, which remember is as often as you choose. And remember, you can always turn the new email alerts back on for a temporary period if there’s a flap on, and turn them off again afterwards.

If you still think you need to be alerted to emails from specific people immediately, but want to turn off new email alerts for everyone else, I offer you selective new email alerts. You create a rule in Outlook to show you new email alerts when specific people email you, but nobody else.

My recommendation is to switch off all new email alerts if possible. But if there are some people who send you emails which are potentially more urgent than anything else you might be doing, selective email alerts can be a handy compromise.

How to Disable New Email Alerts for All or Some Senders

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