I have a stimulus response addiction…

Performance and productivity expert, Andrew May poses the question: ‘What does the perfect week look like?’. Is it an eight day week, if you had an extra day what would you do with it? Apparently 63% of Australian workers are sleep deprived… (not me, since I got my new sleep cycle app for my iPhone). It is much harder to be productive, let alone enjoy what we do if we are perpetually tired.

Running from one thing to the next, never having time to be creative or think, means that we are always being stretched to peak performance. But no one plays at peak 16 hours a day, every day.

Apparently the average person working in an office gets interrupted every four minutes (80-100 times a day) yet it takes 25 minutes to really focus on a task. Does that mean we are actually going backwards or that we are not giving our undivided attention to the task at hand?

Furthermore, 85% of Australians feel that life is getting more and more hectic. All these labour saving gadgets actually just mean we do more.

May has some great thoughts about how to reduce this problem:

• Break the email addiction
• Learn to have fleeting meetings
• Create energy management
• Master mindfulness
• Forced isolation

Now you might want to read his book Flip the Switch if you want to discover what he means by all of these. I was particularly interested in the notion that I am dependent on my email – and that I have a stimulus response addiction (a bit like poker machine players).

Here are his seven email ideas…

• Turn off email pop up alerts (and sound).
• Schedule times that you check it (not first thing in the morning – start the day on what you want to work on, not responding to others).
• Give up email tennis (talk instead).
• Unsubscribe to anything you don’t read or want to get.
• Never write a thesis (it is a short message medium).
• Refrain from using BCC.
• Get a great spam filter.

May suggests he can save an hour a day (which adds up to a lot of time in a week/month/year). I have taken on six of his suggestions…. but I still find myself drawn to go back to it… especially because I might be the instigator of the email or there might be something urgent. I do find that I am much quicker at dealing with all the emails at once, as you don’t dwell on them so much. The fact that I even feel this means that I know it is an addiction.

It took me a week to go cold turkey and give up coffee – it might be a bit longer with this one.

Naomi Simson is the 2008 National Telstra Women’s Business Award winner for Innovation. Naomi was also a finalist for the Australian HR Awards and a finalist for the BRW Most Admired Business Owner Award in 2008. Also in 2008 RedBalloon achieved a 97% Hewitt employee engagement score. One of Australia’s outstanding female entrepreneurs, Naomi regularly entertains as a professional speaker inspiring middle to high-level leaders on employer branding, engagement and reward and recognition. Naomi writes a blog and has written a book sharing the lessons from her first five years.