As long as you don’t get too many emails a day, and/or you’re the type that habitually keeps unread emails down to zero, the notifications thing works well. I use a browser extension that does it for gmail, I don’t think it does anything to increase the time I spend checking email compared to if I just went through them once daily, it just means the time is distributed from one short bit to several even shorter bits throughout the day.
I believe that you are mistaken, regardless of the number of emails you get, as long as it is at least several per day. I used to do this and thought it wasn’t wasting any time, but I became much more productive after adopting this method for handling email.
On reflection, I only get things that actually need a reply a few times a week, and probably a majority are automatic ones that are effectively spam. I’m an undergraduate student with a poor work ethic, so most of what I do is much less productive than checking email, and that plus being more-or-less friendless means I have some preference for getting some emails per day regardless of what they are—I should fix this, upon doing so I’d probably only be getting 1-3 a day, still mostly not needing a reply.
But your system sounds like a waste of a monitor, I could resolve to just look at the icon in the corner of my screen for the browser extension and click through to gmail once every four hours, and there must be some kind of equivalent for outlook you could use—why dedicate a whole second screen to it?
It doesn’t take the whole monitor, there are five or six other things on that screen also left open. There are several advantages to it being open, e.g. it’s slightly faster to drop files etc onto it in order to create emails with attachments etc.
It would probably not make a big difference if I did something like you suggest, however.
Right, yes, of course—I was typical-minding, I personally find having several small window open on a screen aggravating, seems “imperfect” and ugly compared to one maximised window per screen at a time.
As long as you don’t get too many emails a day, and/or you’re the type that habitually keeps unread emails down to zero, the notifications thing works well. I use a browser extension that does it for gmail, I don’t think it does anything to increase the time I spend checking email compared to if I just went through them once daily, it just means the time is distributed from one short bit to several even shorter bits throughout the day.
I believe that you are mistaken, regardless of the number of emails you get, as long as it is at least several per day. I used to do this and thought it wasn’t wasting any time, but I became much more productive after adopting this method for handling email.
On reflection, I only get things that actually need a reply a few times a week, and probably a majority are automatic ones that are effectively spam. I’m an undergraduate student with a poor work ethic, so most of what I do is much less productive than checking email, and that plus being more-or-less friendless means I have some preference for getting some emails per day regardless of what they are—I should fix this, upon doing so I’d probably only be getting 1-3 a day, still mostly not needing a reply.
But your system sounds like a waste of a monitor, I could resolve to just look at the icon in the corner of my screen for the browser extension and click through to gmail once every four hours, and there must be some kind of equivalent for outlook you could use—why dedicate a whole second screen to it?
It doesn’t take the whole monitor, there are five or six other things on that screen also left open. There are several advantages to it being open, e.g. it’s slightly faster to drop files etc onto it in order to create emails with attachments etc.
It would probably not make a big difference if I did something like you suggest, however.
Right, yes, of course—I was typical-minding, I personally find having several small window open on a screen aggravating, seems “imperfect” and ugly compared to one maximised window per screen at a time.