You already know that your email can be a source of stress. And if you’ve installed GTD in your workflow to even a small extent, you’ve found that you can reduce the stress of email by simply going through GTD’s Process and Organize phases. A recent article in The Telegraph quotes new research that “filing emails into folders also lowered levels of stress and prompted a sense of well-being because it helped people feel in control.”

That’s good, because “the study also found that people were unable to identify accurately when their body was showing signs of stress and often were unaware of their state.”

What are your signs that stress is building up?

Email ‘raises stress levels’

Email is supposed to make modern life easier, but it is making workers more stressed than ever as they struggle to stay on top of hundreds of messages per day, according to researchers.

By Nick Collins, Science Correspondent

7:00AM BST 04 Jun 2013

Reading and sending emails prompts telltale signs of stress including elevated blood pressure, heart rate and levels of the hormone cortisol, a study found.

Researchers who followed a group of 30 government employees found that 83 per cent became more stressed while using email, rising to 92 per cent when speaking on the phone and using email at the same time.

Although receiving a single message was no more stressful than answering one phone call or talking to someone face-to-face, emails had a stronger effect overall because people received so many each day.

Researchers believe that emails can add to stress levels. Photo: ALAMY

 

Read the full article here.

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Here’s a quick challenge: go through all your emails still in “IN” and handle all the less-than-two-minute ones. Same for your to-read stack. For those kind of things it’s time to be made of Teflon.—David Allen

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Have you heard others talk about inbox zero but thought it was out of your reach?

Most people are not getting their email inboxes to zero on a regular basis, for one or more of these three reasons.
1. They don’t know how to process their email.
2. They don’t know where to put processed email, i.e. how to organize it.
3. They don’t create the time to process their email to zero.

The GTD Managing Email webinar on April 18 addresses all three of these reasons. This webinar will share the best practices of managing email and getting your inbox to zero on a regular basis. The focus will include strategies for dealing with backlog email, structuring email to support action management, the GTD models for processing and organizing email, and storing reference information.

Yes, you can achieve inbox zero!

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Cue released data, and The Atlantic commented on it, showing that most of us wrote a novel’s worth of email last year.

What’s more surprising is that we received more than six times as much email as we sent. Even if you deleted some of that email without needing to read it, you probably read several novel’s worth of email last year.

If you’re still not handling email as efficiently as you can be, try a 60-minute webinar on email management. The focus will include structuring your email system to support action management, and dealing with backlog email.

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I assert that it’s actually less effort to maintain your email inbox at zero than to maintain it at 300 or 3,000. Will it take effort? Of course. But there is gold to be mined there with a trusted practice that will have ripple effects across your workflow and motivation.

At a certain point, you will clean up your email. For some people twenty is too many. And for some, it’s five thousand. Different standards for “stuff.”

These standards are very powerful unconscious drivers of your behavior and permitted experience. You may consciously think you’d like to keep a neater house, or process your email more regularly, but if you don’t change the set point of the real standards you have about the amount of out-of-control-ness you actually will tolerate, they will slide back in spite of your best intentions. Pit your willpower against your unconscious cruise controls, and guess where I’ll place my bets.

If the good fairy visited everyone you know and work with right now and magically dissolved every email sitting in IN, within days the number would be back up to the comfort zone of the individual. Some people would have twenty, some three hundred, and some two thousand. Even people doing the same jobs, at the same level, with the same amount of input.

For email, it’s actually less effort to maintain it at zero than to maintain it at three hundred. The decision about the next action is still unmade for much of what lies in IN (hence it is still “stuff,” i.e. something in your world for which the action is still unclear). Every time you even slightly notice that email again and do not dispatch it, it wastes energy. As soon as you allow indecision on the front end with any of your input, you have broken the code and it will mount up all around you.

This excerpt is from a recent issue of David’s Productive Living newsletter. It’s free and sent about every 4 weeks. You’ll find essays from David Allen, thought-provoking quotes, and productivity tips you can use every day.

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In the most recent Productive Living, David Allen asks why so many knowlege workers don’t consider processing their inbox to be part of their work. It’s as if they consider processing their inbox to zero to be a luxury reserved for those who don’t get much input or don’t have anything better to do.

DAVID’S FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Processing your work is part of your work

I’m struggling with my impatience. I’m not as neutral as I’d like to be yet about how many professionals regard their inbox processing time as “extra” work that they can’t find time to do.

The stress many people feel can be directly attributed to the avoidance of daily and weekly catching up—with the flood of emails, voice mails, meetings, projects, and other informational and actionable items.

Most people behave as if this stuff is relatively unimportant. I argue that it’s where much of their primary value lies. Knowledge workers are paid to bring their intelligence to bear on input, and improve things by doing that. The decision about what to do with an email and its contents, what it means in terms of the work and standards at hand, is knowledge work.

Keep reading David’s article.

Subscribe to Productive Living. It’s free and sent about every 3 weeks. You’ll find essays from David Allen, thought-provoking quotes, and productivity tips you can use every day.

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Scanning an email and leaving it in “In” because it’s not as important as other emails at the moment creates double reading, double thinking, and double decision-making (not to mention the nagging it creates in the psyche in the meantime.) – David Allen

Want more tips from David Allen on managing email? Grab the free article: Getting Email Under Control.  There’s also a great webinar with the Coaches on GTD Connect on Managing Email.

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Google announced Priority Inbox today and the emails started flooding in asking, “Isn’t this anti-GTD?”

Google says that Priority Inbox “automatically identifies your important email and separates it out from everything else, so you can focus on what really matters.”

So, what does David Allen say about this kind of tool and the questions about something that sorts your inbox being “anti-GTD?”

Having email sorting/filtering would be anti-GTD if you use it to avoid decision-making, but not if it’s just for evaluating what kind of attention to put on something. Using colors for certain people’s emails in  Lotus Notes (as I do) would also be “anti-GTD” if you never dealt with the non-colored ones. We’re not officially endorsing or recommending this.  Just saying it’s something that you can make work.  – David Allen

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A contribution from Eric Mack with ICA, developers of the “GTD Enabled” application eProductivity for IBM Lotus Notes

Does your employer block productivity apps on your BlackBerry, iPhone, or Android Smartphone?

With the recent discussions about Apps and how consumers want the freedom to find, evaluate, and purchase Apps for their Smartphones, I wonder how many users are able download and use a productivity application and how many have policies that prevent them from doing so.

If you found a productivity application for your mobile device that was proven to increase your performance, would you: a) be allowed to install it? b) encounter resistance (or refusal) from IT to allow you to install it? c) make a business case to management for why this App should be allowed?

Please take a moment to take the quick poll then scroll down to share your comments.

[Read more →]

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The next Webinar on GTD Connect will be “Digging Out From Backlog”.  Two of our senior coaches will give you tips, tricks, and strategies for dealing with your piles of “stuff”.  If you feel like your backlog is holding you back from getting the most out of GTD, this Webinar is for you.  Free to all GTD Connect members (free trial members too).   Thursday, July 15 @ 11am PDT.  Register on the home page of GTD Connect.

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