Why I'm taking a Schrödinger’s Cat approach to work email
The email is equally there and not there....but checking all the time isn't the answer!
For those of you who watch The Big Bang Theory (it’s a go-to binge fest in our house!), you will have heard of Schrödinger’s Cat experiment.
For those who haven’t heard of it, here’s a bit of an introduction:
Schrödinger’s cat experiment is a famous idea that a scientist named Erwin Schrödinger came up with in 1935. He wanted to show how strange and confusing the world of very small things, like atoms, is. He imagined putting a cat in a box with a device that could make it die or live by chance. The device had a small piece of material that could break down and release some invisible rays. The rays could make a machine detect them and open a bottle of poison that would kill the cat. The material had a 50% chance of breaking down in a certain time. Schrödinger said that according to some rules of physics, the material was both broken and not broken at the same time until someone looked at it. So, the cat was also both dead and alive at the same time until someone opened the box and saw it. Schrödinger thought this was silly and did not make sense for big things like cats. He wanted to show that the rules of physics were wrong or incomplete. But his idea also made people think more about what is real and how we know it when we look at very small things.
Now, from an animal cruelty standpoint, I’m not a fan of this but….the premise is super interesting when it comes to overthinking, something which I am prone to do! And work email is one of those areas where my thinking goes into overdrive. I have very little self-control when it comes to checking work email so I have had to set some pretty hard boundaries around it.
My work email boundaries
I only check my emails a few times a day (I must admit that this one is still a work in progress!) - the plan is that I check my emails when I log on, after lunch and then again before I log off. I am rubbish at this at the moment because there’s a mixture of FOMO and wanting to control and deal with situations/requests as soon as they come in. As a content marketing manager who needs time to do deep work, checking email constantly is a form of procrastination, especially when I’m staring at a blank page at the start of a content project. It’s one that I am determined to knock on the head!
I don’t check emails after I’ve logged off for the day or when I’m on leave - I work for a global organisation so there will be someone somewhere in the world sending me emails at all hours of the day. To keep checking them and responding in real-time just isn’t sustainable (and it’s also not expected!). I have gotten much better at this during a normal working week, my issue is checking while I’m on leave or over the weekend so that I can relax and enjoy my time off (or overthink about something that’s come in that I need to deal with, not a great way to spend your free time!)
I don’t have my work emails on my phone - the only exception is when I’m travelling and won’t have access to the internet, but this has been rare since the pandemic. This is a pretty hard and fast rule for me and the email app comes back off the phone once I’m back in my lovely home office again.
There is also an element of remembering that I am not that important within my organisation, I am not running the company or even a department and my content projects luckily are rarely dramatic or too stressful! 20-year-old me would have hated that because she saw being “very busy and important” at work as the marker of success, 42 year old me loves that no one is calling me or emailing me about the big scary critical decision-level stuff!
OK, you have set boundaries…but where does the cat come in?
I’m so glad you asked! Setting all of the boundaries in the world wasn’t helping me with my tendency to overthink about the emails that may or may not be in my inbox. This overthinking often led to me breaking my own boundaries and checking email when it wasn’t appropriate (evenings when I got back from the gym, Sundays when I should have been spending time with my husband and we have declared the day a chill day, towards the end of my vacation, etc…).
Now, this doesn’t seem so bad on the surface, “so you check your email sometimes when you shouldn’t, no big deal, everyone does it.” The problem was that before I gave in a checked my damn inbox, there was a whole host of overthinking/catastrophising going on:
I wonder if [insert colleague name] has responded to my rush request, if not, the project will be derailed and I’ll have to explain it to my manager and she might be mad at me/blame me…You know what, sometimes projects get delayed, my boss and her boss have never been mad at me, they’ve just supported me.
I bet I get pushback on X,Y,Z situation, how am I going to handle that, I hate having difficult conversations, what should I say, will I need to escalate this… This does happen (it’s unavoidable) but it’s never as unpleasant as I imagine it will be.
What if the feedback has come through on the white paper/blog/report and it’s terrible, I’m rubbish at my job, what if they fire me because my content isn’t good enough… I’ve been at my current company for nearly 8 years, and in this role for 4, so, so far so good!
I have been away for a week, I hope nothing’s blown up while I’ve been off, I need to check my email to get ahead of it and think about how to respond/defend myself…This line of overthinking is a hangover from a role at a different company where whenever I got back off holiday there was something that had gone to shit or turned into a drama while I’d been away and I wanted to be prepared before being ambushed by my unreasonable boss as soon as I got to the office the next day! Apparently, I haven’t quite recovered from that yet! This hasn’t happened for well over a decade but it still triggers me.
What if someone puts a meeting in my calendar first thing in the morning and I’m late because I haven’t checked my emails…. This has never actually happened because I’m an early starter as my brain peaks in the morning!
I realise that none of these are rational but it’s where my brain goes and I’m only giving you the highlight reel!
The truth is, even when I checked my email out of hours, I wasn’t responding or actioning anything so when I got to my desk the next day I was no further forward. I had just had another 12 hours to think about what I had read and needed to respond to. This behaviour wasn’t making me more productive!
Back to Schrödinger’s cat…
The other weekend as a bout of this overthinking threatened to start after a particularly busy week, but this time, I decided that when thoughts about specific emails or projects came through I would start thinking like Schrödinger. The emails I am imagining are both in and not in my inbox and I won’t know which it is until I get back to my desk, and that’s OK.
It sounds super simple but do you know what…it worked! It interrupted the stream of overthinking and as I kept doing it, my thoughts got less and less powerful. For the first time in a looooong time, I didn’t open my laptop between logging off on Friday and Monday morning. It felt great!
My sense is that this is going to take commitment and practice but so far so good. I’m hoping that this is the start of me breaking the final unhealthy habit I have when it comes to my work email.
Do you have any tips or tricks about having a healthy relationship with your work email? Do share in the comments, maybe it’s something we could all use.