Mindful March: Emails begone!

I’m currently working through The Art of Stopping Time by Pedram Shojai. It’s a book structured in one hundred days’ worth of mindfulness prompts and reflections.

This is what came out of day four.

Honestly, didn’t expect to be spending so much time in my email inbox today – or rather so little time.

That sentence makes more sense if I explain: today’s task in The Art of Stopping Time was to take thirty to sixty minutes in the morning to focus on your email inbox, and then not look at the email again until later that day, if you needed to. The idea is that we spend so much time task switching – moving between a task and checking our email, and then trying to go back to the task – that it is limiting our focus on just one thing. Therefore, the things we are doing are of lesser quality. We aren’t meeting them with our full attention*.

*Is this mindfulness, or business school? After sitting in nature yesterday, this feels like a huge 180!

Anyway, after 30 minutes of going through my inbox and rotating between archive, delete, and unsubscribe, I managed to cut my unread emails down by four hundred *!

*Please don’t ask how many unread emails I have. That is a whole other blog post meltdown we just don’t have time for today.

And no, I did not read all those four hundred emails because they just weren’t worth reading. It is AMAZING how many useless things I have signed up for. Maybe useless is a bit of a strong word, but you can only read so many emails with “LAST CHANCE TO BUY” in the title before your eyes start to glaze over.

I suppose this is meant to be a habit – the lesson here is that I should try to keep my focus on one task at a time. It feels like an honourable goal. A lofty goal. A mighty goal.

But, if I am truly honest with myself, I am not sure I can achieve it. Even while deleting these emails and trying to focus just on the emails, I was messaging Julie at the same time. I was listening to music. I clicked into different tabs. I picked up my phone and put it down again. I paused to get a glass of water. I occasionally stared at a sleeping duck.*

*This bit makes more sense if you realise I am using a game called PomoFarm to track my focus time. It combines the joys of the Pomodoro technique and cosy farming games to help you be more productive. OH pro-DUCK-tive! I just got it. Ha!

I also checked my email quite frequently later. I guess my boundaries were not as firm as they could have been.

See! A duck sleeping in the corner! I am not going mad!

I like the idea, though. To have focused email blocks in the day.

So maybe this is the thing I am working on now: deliberate choices. Focusing on ONE task at a time. Start to finish.

For some reason, this goal feels… really hard. Is that just me?

2 responses to “Mindful March: Emails begone!”

CJ Antichow

March 5, 2026

Cool! I like this idea, my thing is, i want/need to see those emails and texts and respond to them right away. I can’t just leave them sitting there. I have zero unread emails/texts but it does sound like a good idea to set aside time just for that and then forget about it for a while and focus on something else. Trying hard to un-learn multitasking!

1. Rhi Axtell, Writer
  
  March 7, 2026
  
  I am always in awe of people who have zero unread emails – a mighty super power these days! And yes, un-learning multitasking is a great idea. One more thing we have been taught to do that isn’t the most healthy way to approach life.