The Best Time To Check Email From Work
It’s after dinner. You’re sitting around, and pick up your phone. Time to check email from work…see if something has come up since you left.
When is the best time to check email from work? The answer is below.
Work Email Used To Stay At Work
Before the widespread use of cell phones, and the ability to access email through the web, work email used to stay at work. Once you left your desk, you left your email.
There were some advantages to this…you never had to worry about missing something – because short of staying at work 24/7, you couldn’t know what was going on.
However, now all of us have the ability to check email on whatever device has the ability to access a remote email server. This includes phones, home computers, tablets, and more. And even if your device doesn’t natively support email, if it can launch a web browser, it can check your email.
So now our work email is available all the time, everywhere.
And the fear of missing out keeps us checking it. So here is the best way to check your work email from home.
The Best Way To Check Your Work Email From Home
Here is the best way to check your work email from home:
DON’T.
Don’t hook up your phone. Don’t open web mail. Don’t pull your email into your home email program.
Just Don’t.
Why You Shouldn’t Check Work Email At Home
There are many reasons why I say this.
- Checking work email off hours raises stress. Your non-work hours are the ones where you are supposed to be away from the pressures of work. Bringing work into your home life will allow those pressures to seep in. Plus, if you read an email and there is nothing you can do at the moment, your stress level will rise from your inability to act.
- What are you really missing? If you are focusing on work when you are supposed to be at home, what are you missing? I’m not talking about what you are missing at work. I’m asking what you are missing at home. Are you missing conversation with your family? Quality time with a loved one or pet? Time to work out? Relaxation? Time pursuing your interests and dreams? Why sacrifice this?
- You’re not being paid. If you are salaried, work creeps into home life more often than if you are hourly. But think about it…if you are salaried, the amount of hours you get paid for are the ones you spend at your employer. Everything else you do outside of work is unpaid. Do you really want to work for free?
- What could happen if you don’t check? With the exception of a few professions, very few of us deal with life and death situations. And those professions that do don’t rely on email to communicate the life and death situations. So what is the worst that can happen if you don’t check your email? You might have an irate boss or coworker, but isn’t the problem then with their expectations rather than your refusing to work during your off hours?
Letting work email into your non-work hours is just a way to raise your stress and do unpaid work while you could be focusing on more important matters.
My assignment for you: don’t check your work email from home tonight. Let it go until tomorrow. Then email me at laura@wholelifeproductivity.blog and tell me how it went. Was it easy? Difficult? Did anything go wrong? What did you do instead?
Image by AJC ajcann.wordpress.com. Licensed under Creative Commons. Text Added.
