Creating Purposeful Priorities

We are living through a generational change to the way we work – not just with the emergence of AI, which is changing the fundamentals of how to be successful in a role – but also in the way we work together in a team, communicate with one another, and the systems we use to support these interactions and enable us to get the work done.

A client recently raised that one of their biggest daily challenges was keeping across their emails. They expressed overwhelm due to an overflowing inbox and admitted that they had defaulted to using it as a ‘to-do’ list. This created a significant strategic concern for them, specifically, by letting their inbox determine their activities each day, they asked themselves, what strategic priorities am I neglecting as a consequence?

Today, email distraction has become a serious threat to employee productivity and wellbeing

Email programs are a communication tool at their core. They are designed to notify you whenever new content arrives and filter the information according to their date, sender, or subject line, all of which are determined by the sender, not the recipient.

 Emails are, of course, inextricably linked with task management – indeed many tasks arrive via email or are completed via email – but using our email program as our task manager can risk our capacity to deliver on our true priorities, as it is a to-do list made by other people.

 We know that the distraction caused by email and similar programs inhibits productivity. Gloria Mark’s research reported that we get distracted by emails roughly every 3 minutes and when this happens it takes ~23 minutes to get back to the original task. This not only risks our productivity, but causes stress and a strong sense of overwhelm, which are key drivers of burnout.

 Outside of work, email can bring a sense of intensity and overwhelm into our homes. Notifications from work can arrive after hours (despite Right to disconnect laws creating legal work boundaries for employees), and the quick accessibility to our emails through smart phones means we have developed habits of checking-in, while our kids are in the bath, while we’re cooking dinner, or (please no!) when we’re in the middle of a conversation with our loved ones.

 The challenge, beyond being always-on, is that email does an excellent job of distracting us from our current task, which is likely of higher priority.

At the heart of this challenge, is intentional prioritisation and boundary-setting

Effective prioritisation, not just at the strategic level, but at the day-to-day and individual level can be the difference between success and failure.

We think it’s about time we all assessed and adjusted our habits. Here are three ways we’ve done it in our business:

1.      Establish your boundaries

When do you like to check emails? When do you like to be in flow? When is the best time to talk to people in and outside your organisation? When do you need to be present at home?

There are two aspects to boundary setting:

• The first aspect is individual and requires self-reflection to understand what works for you. Take some time to ask yourself questions like, when do I like to do deep work? When do I observe myself begin to procrastinate or socialise? When I’m at home, what are the triggers that make me feel stressed about work? Are there any patterns to those triggers? These questions will give you a better understanding of when you need multiple hours of focus time, when emails would be a welcome interruption in your day, and how to manage the stress habits that work has created in your home environment.

• The second aspect is collective and requires team communication and collaboration, to understand how your preferences can work with others. At Simple Nimble, we review our availability weekly and discuss things like our home commitments, travel commitments, client bookings, and priorities. At the end of each weekly conversation (we call these our WIP), we understand and adjust our schedules to meet the home and work priorities of each staff member.

2.      Use technology to enable your boundaries

Emails, smart phones, calendars – they’re all tools that exist to help you do what you need to do. They typically come with pre-set settings and often no-one looks at these or adjusts them ever. Not at the beginning, and certainly not mid-use.

To get the most out of your tools, you need to spend a bit of time up-front ensuring they’re settings suit you. Some simple practices that we do at Simple Nimble include:

• For the calendar tools - After we discuss our availability, we adjust our calendars to reflect our discussion. Colour categories delineate home and work commitments, the visibility filter gives further information (like when we’re ‘free’ but committed to deep work), and transparent sharing of calendars means we don’t need to interrupt anyone to find out what’s on.

• For the email tool - we turn off notifications during client facing time, deep work and when we are present at home.

• For our smart phones - we use ‘Focus Settings’ to create profiles for when we’re at work or at home and automate the settings to match our office hours (eg. Work focus is set to 9-5 on work days).

3.      Prioritise independent to your emails

Have one source of truth, separate from your email, where you categorise your priorities and keep a track of everything. Try something new –  we use Odoo - but Teams, Medium, or a notebook are all effective methods for managing tasks that are driven by your priorities. It all depends on how you like to work, how your team interacts and what resonates with your brain.

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We work with leaders to grow high performance. If you want to chat about how we could help you change habits and evolve your or your team’s approach to task management, get in touch today.