I have a ‘stimulus-response’ addiction… you might too

Andrew May poses the question ‘What does the perfect week look like?’. Is it an 8 day week, if you had an extra day what would you do with it?  Apparently 63% of Australian workers are sleep deprived... (not me since I got my new sleep cycle app for my iphone). It is much harder to be productive, let alone enjoy what we do if we are perpetually tired.

Running from one thing to the next, never having time to be creative or think - means that we are always being stretched to peak performance. But no one plays at peak 16 hours a day every day.

Apparently the average person working in an office gets interrupted every 4 minutes (80-100 times a day) yet it takes 25 minutes to really focus on a task. Does that mean we are actually going backwards or that we are not giving our undivided attention to the task at hand?

85% of Australians feel that life is getting more and more hectic. All these labor saving gadgets actually just mean we do more.

Andrew had some great thoughts about how to reduce this problem:

• break the email addiction
• learn to have fleeting meetings
• create energy management
• master mindfulness
• forced isolation

Now you might want to read his book ‘Flip the Switch’ to discover what he means by all of these. But I was particularly interested in the notion that I have a stimulus response addiction to email (a bit like people who play the pokies for days/nights on end seeking instant gratification from the push of a button) Alarming to compare it...

Here are his seven email ideas...

1. Turn off email pop up alerts (and sound)
2. Schedule times that you check it (not morning - start the day on what you want to work on not responding to others)
3. Give up email tennis (talk instead)
4. Unsubscribe to anything you don’t read or want to get.
5. Never write a thesis (it is a short message medium)
6. Refrain from using BCC
7. Get a great spam filter

He suggests he can save an hour a day (which is a lot of time in a week, month or year). I have taken on 6 of his suggestions.... but I still find myself drawn to go back... Sometimes I'm the initiator of the 'need' to email or I worry that there might be an urgent missive that I must attend to. I do find that I am much quicker at dealing with all the emails at once, you don’t dwell on them so much. The fact that I even feel this means that I know that it is an addiction.

It took me a week to go cold turkey and give up coffee - it might be a bit longer with this one.

Thanks Andrew for your insights last week at the Talent2 conference.