I’ve been running two experiments to create the space for greater focus and engagement:
- Daily email limitation–which involves not sending any email before 4pm; and
- Blackberry limitation–which involves not putting a SIM into my work Blackberry before noon
I’m making an adjustment to the Daily email. Colleagues correctly complained that the 4pm email barrage when I finally synched my mail was just delayed dumping. It’s a good point. The idea is not to just hold off on sending email but actually cut back on email and engage in other ways.
Therefore, I’m updating the Daily email limitation to only be able to send 20 emails (rather than the usual 50 or so) at the now 3:30pm sync. We’ll see how that works.
On the Blackberry limitation, I’m going to stop the experiment. The lack of access to a mobile up-to-date calendar increased the stress. Also the ability to at least scan emails was just increasing the daily email dump. I tried a few workarounds but… well… the terms “Malware” and “asset” were involved. I’m still going to make more use of a secondary phone.
And I am sure this is information that you couldn’t live without…
This is such a great topic. This notion of “slow management” requires some sort of team planning or enterprise-wide agreement ( a la VW http://reut.rs/tbiYeC ) or else my “slow” approach may negatively impact others who might not have the luxury of waiting for me to check and respond to email once a day in the afternoon. As you say, the goal seems more along the lines of finding a way to allow everyone in a given situation to reduce their churn…on occasion that may require more attention to email.