The Daily Stoic posted this:
“Napoleon famously would wait three weeks until he opened his mail because he knew that most issues would resolve themselves. If you are always reachable, if you can be gotten a hold of at a moment’s notice, you will not be focused on the big important things, you will not be doing your work.”
For most of my career I prided myself on efficient and rapid response to emails. I could get to inbox zero pretty often, moving only a subset of items to my @action folder. Of course this meant I was constantly busy, and it almost hurt to ‘unplug’ from work because of the addictive adrenaline spikes. I was rewarded for this, especially when I was in direct support and operation leader roles. My main strategy for getting blocks of time for project deliverables was to work early and ‘clear the decks’ to give me some flexible time mid-day.
I’m not in those kinds of roles now. And neither are most senior managers, up to the CEO. They need to structure their accessibility and time quite differently. They’ll pay attention to email or texts from a specific subset of people, but they’re not rewarded for inbox zero across the board.
Here’s my challenge for you: What more could you accomplish with a disciplined approach to being less available and less responsive-in-the-moment? What issues will you force others to resolve (as they should) rather than you driving a resolution? What’s the $10,000/hour and $100,000/hour work that only you can do?
