A guide to convince your boss you need email-free mornings

Email: the communication tool that we all have grown so accustomed to that we don’t know we’re slaves to its pull. Our brains are not wired for the constant task switching that occurs when we check email every six minutes. So, if you really want to get more done, in less time, better, then it’s time to negotiate for email-free mornings, and here is how you do it.

The email obsession that rules our lives

Workaholics (raising my hand here too) have a strange codependent relationship with their inboxes. In Cal Newport’s new book A World without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload he lays out the research, and it’s scary:

• We’re checking our inboxes or Slack messages once every six minutes.
• On average, we’re sending and receiving 126 emails/day.
• Our brains are wired to fret over messages going unanswered.

Cutting the cord with email (temporarily) to maximize productivity

Before you start to freak out about being away from your inbox all day and missing out on important conversations or answering pressing questions from your team, just know I’m only suggesting an hour-long break to start. That’s it. One hour. Baby steps, my hard-working friends.

The pull of your inbox is massive first thing in the morning, but so too is your potential for actual productivity. You see, checking email is not really getting any work done. Real, deep work that requires your utmost focus, like writing a report, prepping for your next presentation, research, strategizing, analysis, and financial planning is easier if you tackle them before your email.

And while you might argue that you can check your email AND do the most important tasks first thing in the morning, that’s true, but it’s just not the best way to get more done.

How to approach your boss for email freedom first thing

You know your management team best, so be sure to tap into their particular personality and pain points when coming up with your argument for a couple of hours a week without being on email. Generally speaking though, they’re going to want to know three things:

1. You will prove that you are getting more done without email.
2. They have the power to veto this experiment at any time.
3. You agree to keep this quiet until they are on board with a full-scale roll-out.

Set up a Zoom meeting with your boss to discuss your proposal, and make it at a time of day that they aren’t frantically responding to emails and in meetings themselves. I’d suggest a mid-week, mid-day timing, so there are no Monday morning emergencies or last-minute 5 pm wrap-ups. 

In your calendar invite explain that this meeting will be short (I’d recommend no longer than 15 minutes) and you’d like to propose an experiment to increase your productivity. They might be skeptical, but what boss doesn’t want their employees to be proactive about getting more done? Now, let’s get into the specifics you need to have prepped for your proposal.

Prepare a one-pager and speak with data

Before you get to the meeting, you need to have the facts, Jack. Get all your research about email tanking productivity down on one sheet of paper and have it in front of you when you get on Zoom. 

Be sure to include personal details. Become your own productivity sleuth this week and record how long you spend in your inbox in the mornings (or each day) and what important tasks are falling off the to-do list because of your email burden. There are even apps (like Toggl and the Tracking Time Chrome extension) for this so you don’t have to be writing things down manually.  

You can steal my stats above and add any of the following as supporting evidence:

• Email first thing robs you of your peak productivity hours, when you’re freshest, most energized, and have your mind clear from other people’s priorities (in your inbox).
• Managing your inbox takes up precious time, and recent research suggests it might be as much as a whole day each week.
• Limiting or banning access to email has been shown to increase employees’ productivity in other studies. 

Have a plan to report your results at the end of this trial run. Let your boss know what you’ll be working on in that email-free time, and have a comparison from before. It’s important to speak from the data as clearly as possible. So, if that report took you three hours previously, spread out over two days, compare the time to completion when you work on it in these email-free zones.

Reinforce the experimental nature and veto power

Proposing a one or two-hour email-free block of time in your morning is radical. Don’t be shocked if the first response is resistance. Your boss may have to spend even more time on email and may link it to a (false) sense of productivity. 

Explain to them that you’re looking to conduct an experiment, and it has an end date. Choose two weeks or a month depending on what your manager will go for.

And make the email-free time period short enough to start that it doesn’t seem too scary. Blocking out your entire morning from 8 am to noon will definitely receive some push-back. 

Start small, and reinforce that if your boss doesn’t like how things are going, you can end the experiment early. It’s just that – something to try. You can also offer up your phone number to them for your email-free time periods in case of a work emergency.

Keep it sneaky, folks

Lastly, sneakiness in these new work methods is always a good thing. First, because many of us are working from home, you can even push the boundaries of your experiment by 10 minutes or so to see if the added time to your most important tasks gets noticed.

Likely, no one will realize, and that will help you get more done and make the case for extending the time block and the experiment.

In addition, offer up the sneakiness to your boss. They’re likely freaking out a little, thinking that all your colleagues are going to ask for this too, and how are they going to coordinate everyone off email? Extend the olive branch to them.

Let them know you’ll keep this little productivity experiment to yourself, and if you need to tell people you aren’t on email for an hour in the morning, your calendar entry will simply read “Jack out of office – personal.” 

When you and your boss are ready to discuss the findings with a larger group at work, you’ll have had time to debrief, create a little report, and be ready to either nix the whole thing or extend it to others. It’s a win-win, and you’ve (hopefully) felt like a productivity rockstar most mornings, working uninterrupted on what matters most.