Reclaiming Your Life(RYL) 1 Email Notifications

First Reclaiming Your Life segment. These segments provide quick life hacks to create more work life balance. 

Today's boundary maker- turning off email notifications on your smartphone. 

Transcript

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Welcome back to education matters New York. I'm your host, Wayne Ackles. And this week's version of education matters New York is a reclaiming your life episode, which is Life Hacks devoted to making sure that you have some boundaries and guardrails set up between your work at in your job and your personal life. And those of us that are school administrators, or former school administrators know how difficult finding that balance can be. And most of us have difficulty with that now, and that's in large part due to the technology that we all have access to. And that's part of the theme of today's life hack. And it's going to start with a simple one. And this revolves around email. And email is probably the bane of most of our existences. And I'm going to just speak to one small hack here that I hope will help create some guidelines and boundaries for you. And that hack is turning that email notification off. When it comes to your home. Excuse me your work, email. And I think this is critical, because we all have smart devices. Now, it's pretty rare that someone doesn't have that powerful little iPhone or Samsung, or pixel or whatever it is that you're carrying, that can easily access and notify you of your emails. And that there's no this particular hack I read years and years ago, and I took it to heart early on in the starting days of smartphones, and have always kept the work email notification off i I forced myself to dig for that. And the reason for that is is it helps with a couple things. One, I'm fairly sure I have undiagnosed ADHD. And it was helpful for me as a administrator, because I could keep a lot of balls in the air at the same time, I could jump from shiny object to shiny object pretty quickly to get things done. But it's not always great when you're trying to concentrate on a specific task to get that completed. And those email notifications can be something that will draw you away from now. Also, the other reason and it's important in terms of not just your attention, but it also sends you know, sets those boundaries between work and home. I think something that is very difficult to do, especially if you're in a leadership position within a school, and sometimes just at different times of the year or when grades are due. If you're teaching her counselor, there are just a lot of times where it's difficult to keep that work life balance, because there's a lot of people counting on you for information, especially, again, grades or transcripts, or different things like that, where were students and their parents may be looking for information and to ease anxiety, etc. But having those boundaries are incredibly important. And by having those notifications off on your phone, it forces more of a controlled time for when those answers go out. And by doing that people will see. And I would even suggest that you put this in your email signatures, something to the effect that you know, all emails will be answered within, again, depending on your district or company's policies 24 to 48 hours, I think that is a reasonable time in order to get back to a email inquiry. You know, something more pressing warrants a phone call and a conversation. But an email inquiry shouldn't be something that is an immediate response. It's not a text message. It's not a phone call that you're responding to. So that is today's life hack. I promised that I would keep these episodes within roughly five minutes so that this doesn't become another time suck. And thank you for taking the time to listen. And next week we'll have a full episode. In the meantime, take care and stay warm. I'm your host Wayne Ackles. Thanks again for joining us.