Email : Tool or tyrant?

When I started working with Steph*, a Finance Director, every day felt a struggle to get through the volume of work on her plate. She was always feeling behind or as if she was missing something.

Steph ended up working late and often at home in the evenings, anxious to try to keep on top of things whilst guilty she wasn’t more present with her family.

When we delved into what was going on, email seemed to be the source of her angst. Not only was email the first thing she did in the morning, it was the centrepoint of her workflow. She had two screens on her desk so she could have one permanently showing email. Not to mention pings telling her when new emails came in.

She felt a rising sense of panic as requests mounted, putting her own priorities aside and dealing with what appeared most urgent.

Getting sucked into the vortex

In my experience working with leaders, Steph’s relationship with email is very common. Email’s the first thing they check in the morning, they’re constantly checking it during the day, and even before they go to sleep.

Like Steph, they want to make sure they don’t miss anything. And if they’re working across timezones, they can feel even more pressure to be constantly “on”.

The thing is, it’s easy to get sucked into the vortex.

Once you’re in email, you feel like you need to respond straightaway to requests, especially from senior stakeholders or clients. While you’re there, you think you may as well polish off a few emails while you’re at it, even though they’re not important – it feels good to be busy and reduce your “unread emails” tally.

In the meantime, replies from your first responses have come in so you respond to them… Time passes, you haven’t done anything you meant to do, your next meeting’s imminent and you’re feeling tired and wired.

This isn’t about email

The thing is, this isn’t really about email.

I can talk about dopamine, about how our devices are designed to make us want to check them.

About how we get a dopamine hit whenever we anticipate a “reward” like an email, even greater than the “reward” itself.

About how the earlier in the day and the more often we check email/our phones, the higher our dopamine threshold gets and the more we check, seeking another hit.

But I think what this is really about is believing that we need to keep people happy because we’re worried they’ll think badly of us if we don’t. Which means we believe being available and responsive to other people is A Good Thing, and email is the go-to means of doing that in the modern workplace.

It makes absolute sense because we’ve evolved to do what we need to do to survive which means keeping on people’s right side and maintaining our place in our tribe, but…

Responsiveness is not a recipe for leadership.

Dealing with email is a bit like being on a tennis court. There are loads of people on the other side of the net lobbing balls at you. You feel like you have to catch them all and, in the meantime, you’re dropping the important balls you meant to deal with.

The people on the other side of the net look happy because they’ve offloaded their balls on to you. But just because people lob balls at you, doesn’t mean you need to catch them.

Sure, there’s going to be certain stakeholders that you’re going to want to be respond promptly to, or certain projects you want to keep on top of. The rest? If they really need you, they’ll bug you.

This is hard

This is hard, because not allowing other people to dictate your agenda means tolerating the discomfort of worrying what people might be thinking of you, the discomfort of the occasional annoyed stakeholder – and the discomfort of giving yourself the time to deal with what’s really important.

Because let’s be honest, it can feel far easier to keep busy with “stuff” in the form of emails than grapple with the intangibility of being strategic, especially when you’re a new leader.

Going back to Steph, she wanted to get out of the weeds, but that wasn’t going to happen unless she distanced herself from email and made time to think about the bigger picture. Her first experiment was to find a private space with a pad and pen at the beginning of every day, when she was freshest, to think about her leadership priorities. This habit has been a game-changer for many of my coaching clients whether it be 30 minutes or 2 hours to focus on what’s important.

She’s also turned off notifications so she’s not constantly interrupted by emails and messages and has more agency to choose when she checks.

It’s still a work in progress for Steph, but she now has a vision and a strategy that she’s implementing through her team and she’s more aware and intentional about how she spends her time and energy.

What about you? Is email your tool – or your tyrant?

*Steph is a fictional director based on real-life clients