Tomorrow, it turns out, isn’t just Veterans Day — it also happens to be the inaugural No Email Day.
The group’s founder, a British project manager named Paul Lancaster, encourages all of us to “stop using email completely for 24 hrs” in order to “do something more productive with the time saved.”
Ideally, Lancaster would love to see entire companies ditch their email all day, and some of them have (you can see no-email pledges pop up on the group’s Twitter feed).
But there are also ways to participate if you aren’t willing or able to stay away from email for a whole day. See No Email Day’s manifesto for some good tips on cutting down on the amount of time sucked up by relatively useless emails. You could start by turning off all those automatic notifiers that merely tell you that more email has arrived: “they’re an unnecessary distraction that will just lead you to lose your train of thought or click on [them] like Pavlov’s Dog responding [to] the bell.”
Lancaster’s also as much a fan as we are of using phone calls, IM chats, and face-to-face conversations to get projects moving — a few words can avoid an onslaught of cc’s, follow-ups, and forwards. [via Lifehacker]
Related:
- Dealing with email overload [Mark Hurst]
- Say Goodbye to Email? [Ty Kiisel]
- No Email Day wants you to quit your inbox for 24 hours [The Next Web]
