Emails are a pressure of the modern world, people are always able to message us quickly and there’s a sense that we need to respond. It’s not just emails, it’s all kinds of devices, things that alert us to another message or another thing we might need to think about. And these can become distractions. They stop us from focussing on what we’re trying to do, and becomes something that pulls us away into what the devices want, what the email wants us to do.
So the role of stopping it for five minutes might not seem like very long but what it’s doing is breaking that habit. We train ourselves at getting so good at checking our emails that it becomes the only thing that we want to do. When you feel tired or when you have something big to to do that you’re putting off what do you do? You check your email.
So try to resist the urge to do that, even for a short time. Put the email away and try to focus on something else instead. The more you do it and the more you practice it, the more you start to allow yourself to check your email when you choose to, rather than when your email wants to be checked.
Just reading this might have made you think about checking your email, but try to do resist the urge to do it and spend five minutes doing something else.