In the aftermath of Covid, short sketches went around on social media, highlighting some of the frustrations and even absurdities of online meetings by representing them in a physical setting. The same parody could be applied to our relationship with email. Imagine constantly checking your physical mailbox throughout the day, or having a random salesperson ring your doorbell every 10 minutes. That would seem absurd. So why is it that we don’t even think about something being off with checking our mail frequently and getting random notifications just because it happens digitally?
Some occupations require just that – standing guard at the inbox at all times for business to work at all. The same is true during certain PhD phases, where there is a need of being alert and reachable for coordinating appointments, empirical work or securing spots on courses. For research work itself, the inbox is rarely urgent.
If email has snuck in to become a distraction from getting uninterrupted time to think about your research, here are some strategies that can help
Be irresponsible
In an old BBC Interview physicist and Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman explained that to think and develop ideas in research you need solid stretches of uninterrupted time. To secure this time, Feynman avoided being assigned any administrative work by creating the myth about himself that he was irresponsible. This strategy protected him from committee work and other academic service obligations, allowing him to focus his time on research and teaching. Following this advice of letting others think you are irresponsible is of course not straightforward. Being able to mobilize the strategy of ‘irresponsibility’ in claiming time for deep work is not equally distributed. Throsby’s (2013) research shows how in contrast to men, women who take time for leisure pursuits like marathon swimming must demonstrate extreme cases of sacrifice to justify this when confronted with other responsibilities. Similarly, the privilege of being deemed irresponsible in academia without repercussions falls unevenly. What some can deploy as a deliberate strategy for protecting their research time, others must defend through different means, or simply cannot risk at all. Still, there is something valuable to take from Feynman’s strategy when it comes to email among other academic work tasks. In order to be truly responsible to your research and deep work, you sometimes need to be selectively irresponsible about what can feel like the urgent demands of others in your inbox.
Beyond Feynman’s strategic approach, the following practical steps will help you be selectively irresponsible about email demands.
Turn off all notifications
The lowest-hanging fruit to avoid email being a distraction during your deep work hours is to turn off all notifications on your computer and phone of any new incoming emails. No sounds, no messages, no pop-ups. Just remove everything. There is help available online for turning off all notifications for your specific device types.
Schedule your email checking
A common piece of advice is to schedule a fixed timing per day (or perhaps a few if necessary) for checking your email. This will protect against being continuously interrupted in your workflow throughout the day. Interruptions in your work cause not only a distraction in the moment, but also result in worse focus and performance on the important tasks for the day, while much of your attention remains lingering in the inbox (Newport, 2016, pp. 41-43). Sticking to this advice is hard though. I see two reasons for this. First, it’s difficult to schedule the right amount of time in your calendar. Most days email will not take more than a few minutes while sometimes it takes considerable time if there are a lot of things to do and decisions to make. But the other thing that makes it hard to stick to an email checking schedule only once a day is that we tend to check email when work gets boring. And research is boring at times, for example reading boring research articles or writing things that needs to be written but are boring to write. Here email becomes a welcome distraction even though it’s not in itself particularly exciting. Getting into the habit of scheduling a specific time for email together with other admin work such as planning the next day can help. As for using email as a distraction from boredom: it takes practice and effort to sit with boredom. It also takes practice to choose better things to do than email checking in moments where we just need a break from it all.
Separate newsletters from your other email
Newsletters are a great way to get curated content that you find meaningful and helpful. Mingled with your other emails, though, they can quickly make your inbox feel cluttered, add to the distraction and create information overload. Further, if newsletters live inside of our email there is one more reason to go to our inbox when we feel bored. This is why the simple act of separating newsletters from your email inbox is really helpful. This separation can be done by creating a free email account only for newsletters and using this every time you sign up for something new. Or if you want to go for a paid solution, there are several newsletter readers on the market, providing both an email handle to sign up to your newsletters through and often also a beautiful app for reading your newsletters. This makes newsletters feel like a curated feed, where there are only things you are actually interested in and want to learn from. Search for newsletter readers online and you will find lots of options.
Extract your calendar from Outlook
If you have your calendar in Outlook you are forced to pass your email inbox to get to it. This inevitably leads to noticing new email. I don’t know anyone strong enough to resist the urge to look at what has landed in the inbox before even getting to the real intention of checking the calendar. One way of resolving this is to get into the habit of checking the calendar on your phone. This is possible only if your work calendar is synced with your phone’s calendar, but unfortunately it’s not always possible due to organizational security policies. Another way of bypassing the route through your inbox is to leave your Outlook open in the calendar window throughout the day. A third way to minimise the route through your email to get to your calendar is to extract your appointments from your Outlook into a physical calendar in your notebook or planner, for instance once a day when planning for tomorrow. (This could well be paired with your scheduled email checking).
Don’t send emails before it’s absolutely necessary
Sending email most likely means receiving responses, and sending email also means checking that others have responded to the emails you have sent. Instead of sending several emails, sometimes things can be bundled and sent in one go. In short, send as few emails as possible.
Despite the general usefulness and success of email for personal and professional communication, it can easily become a detriment to the distraction-free workspace needed to truly think about our work. Implementing steps to make sure that email is not what causes interruptions throughout the day is difficult, but keeping the email distractions at a minimum is an essential element in shielding your deep work time for research.
References
Järvinen, M., & Mik-Meyer, N. (2025). Giving and receiving: Gendered service work in academia. Current Sociology, 73(3), 302–320. https://doi.org/10.1177/00113921231224754
Newport, C. (2016). Deep work: Rules for focused success in a distracted world (1. edition). Grand Central.
Throsby, K. (2016). Immersion: Marathon swimming, embodiment and identity. Manchester University Press.
