‘No Email Day’ Might Not Save You, But These Tactics Will

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Today, civil cervants in the United Kingdom are taking a No Email Day. A matter of efficiency, according to Stephen Kelly, the Cabinet Office’s Chief Operating Officer, and former Nasdaq executive. Meanwhile, I’ve already read and replied to over a dozen emails.

This plague of digital communication has infiltrated our minds in ways we never could have imagined. Patience is gone as we expect replies in mere minutes. We open our inboxes to find three dozen or more messages awaiting us like a list of digital chores. We refresh our inbox constantly, transforming us into a nation and world of obsessive-compulsives. At least with laptops and desktops, we can shut it down. Now, with the proliferation of smartphones, we often cannot. 

If a person read and mailed ten to twenty letters daily in the pre-email days, we would have called them crazy. And, yet, this is our current lot. So, how does one day of no email truly address what plagues humanity in the digital age? It doesn’t. Other tactics are required. 

In my case, boundaries were set in early 2013. My sanity and ability to relax hung in the balance, and so did my health. The addiction to checking my inbox had crossed over from the digital realm to physical reality, creating negative biological effects. I felt an uptick in eye spasms; a much higher frequency of migraine headaches (which I’d had a few times per year, though not always); back pain from bad posture; a pain in my ass from sitting too long; bad late night eating habits; and mild insomnia that triggered a chain reaction of exhausted days, one spilling over into the next, compounding, and leading ultimately to a type of omni-present but manageable anxiety that manifested as irritability. I didn’t want to be on the internet that much, checking my inbox—amongst other things—and ocasionally I let friends, family, and acquaintances know it.

So, in the spring of this year, I decided that I would not respond to email after 7:00pm. The idea being that I could at least cut out the people who never stopped working—publicists, mostly, though also some employers. If it were a friend, I’d answer the email depending on subject matter. This strategy worked in a way, but it presented flaws; namely, I was still looking at my inbox and breaking my rule, which made it easier to break that rule for non-friend messages. 

The rule had to be altered. I would not answer any emails at all after 7:00pm: not from publicists, employers, friends, nor family. But, again, I was selective. Though I broke the rule, I got infinitely better at not responding to emails. This vastly decreased time spent looking at my inbox. Call it tough love to those who emailed me; but there had to be a boundary.

One result of this tactic was that I was able to spend more time doing the stuff I love: reading books, watching televeision shows like Snuff Box and Chris Morris’s Jam and Brass Eye. More time was also opened up for my favorite leisure activity: psychogeography. This is the aimless strolling or drifting through urban environments, all in an attempt to reimagine a city’s hidden character and corridors. Instead of lassoing my mind to the digital ether, I really started unleashing it in the three dimensions of New York City. It also gave me more time to be with friends, or peruse used bookstores for forgotten gems. 

One somewhat negative side-effect of my rule was that I found myself doing happy hour more often. This, of course, is fun and economical, but it also meant I was too drunk to read when I got home. Solution: limiting happy hour excursions and maintaining discipline when it came to spending time at work on personal projects. 

Soon, however, I was breaking my rule again. I needed something more robust, so I decided that I wouldn’t login to my email accounts at all after 7:00pm. Most of the time I am good about following this rule. When I do break it, it isn’t to engage in emailing, but Gchat messaging with friends. I’ve been doing even less of that lately, which has greatly helped my sanity. Refusing to read emails on my smartphone makes these tactics even more powerful, as does shutting my laptop down by 10:00pm. Another rule is that I refuse to read email during lunch, unless I specifically tell someone that they can reach me during that time. This is different from being a slave to email; it is an act of permission, which has been lost in the email plague.

The only other tactics that I could possibly deploy are an automated email response explaining to recipients that I do not read email after 7:00pm EDT; or I could verbally alert friends, family, employers, and acquaintances to the same. That is a bold and aggressive move, but maybe it’s precisely what is needed. Think of this as you consider taking a day off from emailing.