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For you who pre­fer lis­ten­ing to read­ing, this post is also avail­able as an episode of the ​“Done!” pod­cast:

There may be rea­sons to keep notifications

I am sure you know all this already. You have heard it before. And if you still have not turned your noti­fi­ca­tions off it is because you feel you have to ​”keep an eye” on the inbox for some rea­son. Per­haps you are not free to check for new emails at your leisure since there are cer­tain kinds of emails that require your imme­di­ate atten­tion as soon as you receive them. It can, for exam­ple, be email from col­leagues need­ing sup­port or emails from real­ly impor­tant clients.

Thus you keep noti­fi­ca­tions switched on and are con­stant­ly dis­tract­ed by all sorts of incom­ing emails for no good rea­son. Not all emails are of the kind that needs your imme­di­ate atten­tion, but all incom­ing mes­sages make the same kind of noise and dis­tract you equally.

You can have both…

I com­plete­ly under­stand. Of course, you want to keep an eye on what is impor­tant. But, the beau­ty of mak­ing the most of our dig­i­tal tools is that you can have the cake and eat it too. You can enable your­self to focus on oth­er things than your inbox and ensure that you are noti­fied when you receive those actu­al­ly impor­tant emails.

Do this

If you want to min­i­mize the num­ber of inter­rup­tions in your every­day life and still keep track of the arrival of impor­tant emails, then do the following:

1. First, turn off all noti­fi­ca­tions in your email-pro­gram or ‑client so that you do not hear or see any­thing when new emails arrive and become more prone to check­ing the inbox when­ev­er you con­scious­ly decide to do so.
2. Think about what kind of emails you still want to be noti­fied of as they land in your inbox. Can you iden­ti­fy any cri­te­ria these emails always must meet? Do these emails con­tain a spe­cif­ic word in the sub­ject line? Are they from a cer­tain per­son or email address?
3. Cre­ate cus­tom alert rules in your email client which will prompt a sound (or sig­nal of some sort) and show a visu­al noti­fi­ca­tion when these impor­tant emails arrive. In Out­look, for instance, you do this by find­ing an email from the per­son whose emails you want to be alert­ed of, right-click it and then click ​”Rules” and ​”Cre­ate Rule”. Tick the box next to the sender’s name and then choose ​“Dis­play in the New Item Alert Win­dow” as well as ​“Play a Select­ed Sound” if you want a sound to go with the noti­fi­ca­tion. If you do not know where to change these set­tings, email me and I will explain.

Now your email-pro­gram or ‑client will remain silent and not dis­turb you except for when you get these par­tic­u­lar and impor­tant emails — as it should if you ask me.

Focused and in control

If you turn off the noti­fi­ca­tions for all non-urgent emails and turn them on for the actu­al­ly impor­tant ones, you will give your­self more space and time to work with­out dis­trac­tions than before but will no longer risk miss­ing some­thing impor­tant. You will be the mas­ter of your own cir­cum­stances to a greater extent and will find it eas­i­er to focus on the tasks that are cur­rent­ly prioritized.

What’s your way?

Do you have anoth­er strat­e­gy or method for noti­fy­ing your­self quick­ly of hav­ing received an impor­tant email? Feel free to email me and share your thoughts.

(By the way, do you know these nine ways to reduce the inflow of e‑mails?)