why I put email back on my phone

Since the beginning of COVID-19, I’ve been dismantling a lot of my productivity and organization systems, trying to put less pressure on myself to get things done and be more mindful in how I spend my time. Several months ago—I cannot remember exactly when—this culminated in taking email off my phone and pivoting away from the excellent Things 3 task management app to a more paper notebook-driven approach to keeping track of what I need to get done. The idea behind all of this was to bring about more balance in my life. By not being able to check my email all the time, I would be less likely to sneak into work mode when “playing jaguars” with kiddo, and the constraints of a physical to-do list are such that I figured I would give myself less to do if I had to write it down and copy it over from week to week.

I’m glad that I tried this approach, but a few weeks ago I made an abrupt and intentional shift back. I put email back on my phone, I’m running all of my tasks through Things 3, and for the first time since grad school, I’m actually not using a paper notebook for personal organization at all. This post is about why I did it—and why I don’t feel bad about it. (It is not, however, an argument that others should do the same!).

Even before COVID—but especially since—I’ve tried to keep relatively low the amount of hours that I spent at work. Right now, I typically set aside about 30-35 hours a week (plus the occasional evening) for what’s theoretically a 40-hour job. Some of this was obviously out of necessity during the worst parts of the pandemic, but even as kiddo has gone back to school and other things have shifted, I’ve tried to cut down on hours spent on campus so that I can be around.

I really like my job, and I’m committed to it. Those are great things for my professional advancement, but they also make it difficult for me to be mindfully present when I’m spending time with kiddo or for me to be a equitable co-parent with my spouse. Intentionally spending time at home that I could be spending on campus is one, small way that I try to compensate for these weaknesses as a parent and spouse—I have a lot more room to grow here, but I am glad that I take these steps.

This approach to things often means that when my family is out of town, I move hard in the other direction, spending extra time on campus or otherwise at work. This isn’t out of any embrace of workaholism, just a natural consequence of how I’m trying to achieve balance: While my family is around, I intentionally carve time out from my professional responsibilities. That sometimes means that I just plain need to catch up by putting in extra hours when that carving out is making me fall behind; if my family isn’t around, that’s a normal time to do some catching up.

So, a few weeks ago, kiddo’s fall break had come around, and she and my spouse decided to spend some time with family, a state or two away. I was ready to get caught up with course preparation, move some research projects forward, and do some grading! However, kiddo got sick before they even reached their destination, so they turned around and came home. Long story short: Not only did I miss out on that extra catch up time that I was counting on, but thanks to doctor’s visits and general worrying about kiddo, I actually spent even less time at work than usual. I have no regrets about any of those “lost hours,” but all that catching up still needed to be done, and I felt like I was in a bit of a pickle.

It was shortly after that that I decided to put email—and my full to-do list—back on my phone. I love the idea of not having email accessible all the time, and I do think that there’s an efficiency bonus that comes from batching email all at once at cetain points of the day. However, so long as I’m intentionally working fewer hours, I don’t want to spend those hours triaging the messages that come into my inbox. I’m still committed to not checking email when I’m “playing jaguars,” but I do think there is something to be said for getting some of that organizational work done in empty moments where I’d otherwise be compulsively scrolling through TV Tropes.

As kiddo gets older and needs (or wants!) less of me around the house on a regular basis, I’ll probably up my hours back to what my instincts tell me that they ought to be. I’m fulfilling all of my responsibilities—and pretty darn well, I’d like to think—but I’m interested in thinking more ahead and being a bit more ambitious in some of the things that I do. Once I do that, I imagine that I’ll also move back to a more mindful “keep work at work” approach. For the time being, though, being there for family means intentionally limited hours at work, intentionally limited hours at work means making the most of those hours, and making the most of those hours means knocking out some of the easy stuff on my phone when I can.

• macro
• Work
• productivity
• to-do list
• task management
• email
• Things
• COVID-19
• parenting

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