Do you complain about interruptions, yet look for them?

At a luncheon yesterday I was sitting next to a guy who admitted that although e-mail presents a challenge, it's primarily because he welcomes the interruption. I'm pretty sure he's not alone.

Lamenting about the endless dump of e-mail into our inboxes has taken over the weather as the  universal, always appropriate, topic of conversation. Everyone can relate.  Now instead of "Boy, how about all this rain?" it's, "Boy, I've got 637 e-mails in my inbox, and that's after I cleaned it out." The listener nods in an understanding, heck-yeah,-I'm-there-too kind of way.

E-mail can be an interrruption, but only if we look at it. If we only look at it three times a day then it only interrupts us three times a day. There's no hard and fast rule about how many times you should check it. But if you say it drives you crazy, you might want to examine whether you check it because you have to, or because you want to.

Comments

[Wendy Gauntt]

This is so true! I went to a conference, then missed nearly the entire event because I obsessively checked my email throughout. It was very stressful because I was missing important educational opportunities to read about things happening 1000 miles away, and yet I kept checking. And checking. And checking. Ugh! It's a really hard habit to break.