Why ‘Just Checking’ Email Is Killing Your Productivity
“Let me ‘just check’ my email before I get back to drafting this report,” you tell yourself, jumping from your Google Doc to your inbox. There’s a new email from a client requesting something from your team. You ping your team on MS Teams to make sure someone picks it up, then return to the report. Moments later, a flash in the bottom of your screen - a question from your team about the request. You respond and go back to the report.
“What time is my next meeting?” you wonder, pulling up your calendar. “2:30. Not for another hour.” Back to the report. “Wait, did I share the agenda with the team?” You check sent mail, it’s still in your drafts. You tweak it and send it. “Right, focus on the report now. I need it finished by EOD.”
6:00 PM arrives. You’re not even halfway through the report and had hoped to leave on time, but you can’t go home until it’s finished. You sigh as you surrender to the fact you’ll stay late. Again.
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Why? Because you’ve fallen into the trap of “task-switching” - jumping sequentially between multiple tasks: writing a report, reading an email, sending a message, checking your calendar, back to the report. No judgment - I’ve been there too. It’s very tempting.
Task switching might seem harmless, it might even feel productive. But beware. It can feel like you’re moving faster, but every switch has a hidden cognitive cost. When you move from writing a report to drafting an email, your brain doesn’t immediately follow your eyes. You may be looking at the next task, but your mind is still thinking about the previous one. Cal Newport, author of Deep Work, calls this “attention residue” - leftover attention from a previous task that reduces your ability to fully engage with the next one.
Repeated switches throughout the day erode our cognitive capacity, reduce productivity, increase errors, and lower quality of output. Research confirms this. A meta-study from the American Psychological Association - a study that combines findings from multiple independent studies - shows that continually shifting between tasks can reduce productivity by up to 40%. That’s huge!
But the loss in productivity is not so much in the seconds it takes to move between tasks. It’s in not giving our brain the time to go deep into anything because we’re skimming like a stone across the shallows of everything. When we allow our brain to lock in on a single task, we maximize productivity and output quality.
Task switching, however, is only a symptom of what I see to be a larger problem. Many office workers in the digital age still operate under the outdated assumption that productivity comes from moving faster. This mindset was true in the industrial age, where factory output was limited by the speed of production lines. But our brains aren’t machines and we’re in the digital age not the industrial age. Attempting to move faster today does not equate to greater productivity. In fact, trying to move faster often drives the task switching that slows us down.
Our digital culture encourages speed and responsiveness. And in the vain attempt to keep up, we end up doing a little of everything but rarely making meaningful progress on any one thing.
The solution? Slowing down and creating systems that reduce task switching. This means adding “deep focus blocks” into your day: uninterrupted periods of time working on a singular task. Only once the block ends do you move to the next task. This allows your brain to fully engage, unlocking previously untapped cognitive potential and a higher-quality of output that scattered attention could never achieve.
Newport offers a nice analogy here: treat a focused block like a dentist appointment - you wouldn’t check your email while having a cavity filled. Well, you could try, but it wouldn’t be pretty or pleasant. Similarly, you won’t check email (or anything else for that matter) during your deep focus blocks.
Of course, we must be careful here not to (as I did) fall into what Oliver Burkeman calls “the fantasy of an uninterrupted life.” Once we see the gains from focused work, it’s easy to think it’s the only way to operate. But trying to be hyper-focused all the time is not achievable (attention is a limited resource) and can create unnecessary added stress if every email, message, or phone call feels like a threat to productivity.
A balanced solution I’ve found, from my experience and in working with high performers across the globe, is this: to ring-fence two hours a day for deep focus. Outside of those hours, let go of the need for singular focus. Emails, messages, and calls are just tasks to be completed, not distractions to induce guilt.
These two hours can be one block or two one-hour blocks. During this time, be ruthless in eliminating distractions. Identify your singular focus, eliminate distractions, and resist the temptation to “just check” anything. Allow thoughts to arise and then float away to wherever it is that thoughts go, staying laser-focused on the task in front of you. So as you look ahead to next week, where will your deep focus blocks be? Open your calendar once you finish reading this and schedule them now.
In today’s digital age, productivity gains no longer come from trying to move faster. The issue for us in the digital age isn’t that we’re moving too slowly - it’s that many of us are trying to move too fast. We increase productivity today not by rushing, but by reducing task switching and giving our brains the time and space for deep work.
And so, the next time 6:00 PM rolls around the former sigh of frustration may be replaced with a smile, as you pack away your laptop and head home on time, with the deep satisfaction of a productive day’s work behind you. And there aren’t many greater feelings you can give yourself than that.
Deepen Your Learning:
10 minute snippet of Cal Newport on the Huberman Lab Podcast sharing how to “avoid distractions and do deep work.”
Cal Newport’s “Deep Work”
