Mukul Verma

A few months back, I decided to remove distractions and one of the biggest modern day distractions is email.  So I outsourced my email, 100%.  Here is how it went -

Everyday at 4:00 PM I would sit with my outsource email assistant and get a list of who its from, what the email was and respond to all the emails I needed too (I get hundreds, but only 5 to 10 need my personal response).  I found being focus on each email for a few seconds or minutes was a lot more productive then spreading it throughout the day and I was less distracted.

So the BIG QUESTION – Can you live without having a personal email?

No, you cannot live without email completely, you do need a personal email in today modern age, mostly for communication with family and asking business questions outside your organization (I don’t communicate to my staff on email, I use a private messenger line) or booking appt (like for rafting and gliding).    you will need a personal email.

However, I will still have my email outsourced that I have used for that past many years and create a personal email which I would only give to family and very close long time friends (very selective and restrictive on this one), rest to Facebook Messages.  Anything that can be filtered like work related friends,  emails from old friends or people who do not email often, will go through the original email set up and not the new one.

What did I learn?

First, the negative responses from others were quite interesting.  I am use to it as the line of work I am is not traditional to any sense and people often its BS or talk, then they wonder how you get the results and envy kicks in (It comes with putting in the work initially).    I consider this blog post and email experiment as work to me.   The responses on this, especially from particular family members were much harsher then normal, but hey most people will just think it not say anything and stay quite.

My responses to both who said it and thought it and did not say it:

There are 2 types of people in this world; ones who build roads and ones who only travel on them.  Have you done anything lately that was not a plan by someone else and you are just doing the work for it?  I created my own path is testing outsourcing email, which was definitely not traditional yet and would go down the build roads path.  Many are happy living down roads where everything they have done, has been done before, that’s cool, I am happy for them.

l do a lot of experiments in my life no one hears about, most are around increasing inefficiency and be more productive working less, this one just happen involve others.

Second, you need a person email as I explained earlier.

Third, having someone clean up your inbox is more feasible then having completely outsource your email.  I get a lot of emails (like several hundred each day), so having someone who can clean everything out and me only doing what is important or critical is a better solution.  I prefer meeting once a day at 4 PM and answering ina  focus set time.

Forth, One of the original reasons I did it was to remove distractions.  I learned checking email is more on the persons discipline and habits.  Some people (like I use too) check is every 2 minutes.  It is to fill the void not to do other more important work.

A friend of mine, Evan Carmicheal suggest having your outgoing on all day and only have it incoming twice a day, this way you avoid distractions.

The real problem here was not email, it was me and my lack of discipline on checking it.   I got stuck in that cycle and needed to break out.

Suggestion on Outsourcing email

When I started this process I spent an hour a day training my outsource email assistant for the first few days and each day improving and improving, getting them to think like I think.  All email is, is a set of commands.  Delete, forward, read, file, respond.  So working with your email assistant at first is critical and keep an eye on what they do in order to avoid mistakes (as they don’t know how you think initially).  This is often forgot and why it does not work (actually this applies to anything with outsourcing)

Conclusion

First; I think everyone needs a personal email;  anyone who is running a completely online email address and living in the modern world and does have a personal email (If you don’t,  want to meet you and learn from you) as I don’t think its possible to go without a email address after this experiment.

Second; discipline and avoiding distractions is the issue, not email avoidance.

Third, focus on emails only and not multi-task will produce better results then writing a email, doing work and talking on the phone (this does not work and its rude to the person you are talking too and company you work for).

If you have got off email or ever tried it, please feel free to share your experience of ideas.