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How to stop e-mail dominating your life

I did this over the summer and it’s life changing:

  1. Remove e-mail apps from your phone and tablet
  2. Remove the e-mail authenticator app from your phone
  3. Get the app Freedom and add Screentime to prevent reinstallation
  4. Get a physical dongle to access your e-mail
  5. Buy a time-delay safe and keep it in your office (around £50)
  6. Sit down and do e-mail once a day for an hour or less then lock the dongle in your time-delay safe until tomorrow’s session when you’re done

A caveat that I couldn’t do this when I was in charge of things which were occasionally time-sensitive. But I’ve been doing this routinely since the summer and it’s amazing, particularly the ritual of locking the dongle away for (most) weekends. It’s been startling to realise that I can almost always do all necessary e-mail in less than thirty minutes if I zoom through it at the end of the day in a focused way.

A tip: start slowly. You have to understand the routines of your work for this to be safe because otherwise you might end up getting locked out. Also have a backup strategy: in my case I can unlock Screentime and delete Freedom then add Outlook to my phone again (the profile is set to automatically remain on the phone) OR I could break the safe relatively easily if I really needed to.

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