If you’ve been reading my posts as part of the 30-day blogging challenge that I’m currently in with my friends, Wes & Darlene Kriesel and Anna Smith, you’ve seen that several posts have been about establishing more intentional practices related to technology, with a couple of these posts focused the exercises in David M. Levy’s Mindful Tech book.

For the last 5 days, I’ve been working on the 2nd exercise in Levy’s book called “Focused E-mail.” Unlike Levy’s first exercise which is observational, this exercise is prescriptive and revolves around exclusive and intentional focus on a particular technological platform/ application/ activity.  I started with e-mail and have continued with that, trying to incorporate both the principles I set up for myself during the first exercise and Levy’s exercise of just doing e-mail, in 15-20 minute (minimum) spurts, not deviating for real life or virtual distractions.

The first day when I started this exercise, I had to laugh at myself.  As soon as I opened my work e-mail application, I got a text message notification from a friend (or family member–I can’t even remember who send the text) and I quit the e-mail application so that I could answer the text and still technically do the challenge.  I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to just turn off the message notifications on my computer, but if I were to do that, I’d still have to take off my Apple Watch, close down all my other applications, notify my family that I’m just doing e-mail (which means this cannot be done at any time when my 3-year old is home because she does not care that I’m trying to focus on e-mail) and make sure my phone was on silent.  And, even if all of that had been done (which it wasn’t, in truth), I would still have been foiled this day by the doorbell. I am just not set up to give my full attention to any one task.

Sigh.

Focused e-mail is super hard.  Although I’m doing Levy’s adapted version where other applications can be open in order to “take care” of the tasks related to e-mail (e.g. opening my calendar to note dates articulated in an e-mail or downloading documents from the e-mail), it’s still a real challenge not to get distracted by other dates on the calendar, by other documents on my desktop, by my sudden overwhelming urge for a cup of tea, and by the fact that somewhere someone likely needs my attention. This is part of the purpose of the exercise, but it was also fascinating to see the degree to which this type of mindfulness is difficult for me.

But, it’s also been a good exercise in many ways.  I would estimate that I typically spent between 90 minutes – 2 hours answering e-mails/ workday previously.  I haven’t spent more than an hour on e-mail since I’ve been doing this exercise. (I’m sure part of this is due to being on break between semesters, but even before engaging in the exercise during break, I was spending a lot more time on e-mail.) Fires sometimes just put themselves out without me, and sometimes, because I’m not rapid-fire responding to e-mails, I realize that many messages don’t need a response at all. I find myself able to focus more on the work that I am doing when I don’t have to leave and come back to it to answer an e-mail that seems more pressing than the work I’m doing.  I’m also much more aware of those distractions that do draw me away from tasks: text notifications, calendar notification, dropbox change notifications.

I think I really just need to turn off notifications. They seem to notify me that I should be stressed.

I appreciated this exercise and think I’ll adopt it, to some degree, as a more regular practice.  I do like setting aside time for e-mail and not having e-mail notifications pushed at me constantly, but focusing to the exclusion of everything else is really, super hard.  It’s probably something I need to work on in all of my life, but for now, I think that I’ll be content to move onto the next exercise in the book which is “observing multitasking.”

Stay tuned…