Email on your smartphone might not be so smart after all!

“I placed my phone on silent at 6pm for the first time in 20 years.

I slept right through till 5 am.”

This was the interesting feedback received from my client Shane after one of my Email Mastery workshops last week. I was (and still am) stunned to realise that he had been allowing email, Linked In, Facebook & other alerts to interrupt his non-working hours (especially his sleep), for so many years!

His decision to turn off his phone occurred during the workshop, when we had discussed a couple of topics that caused him to reconsider his unconscious habit of having his mobile phone at his bedside.

While the points I made about my article on ‘7 Reasons Why Email on Your Smartphone Might Not be so Smart After All’ got him thinking, the ‘penny dropped’ while we were discussing a number of good reasons for using Delay Delivery on outgoing email to control when emails arrive.

As we discussed, while it may be okay to write email at all sorts of odd hours (according to our individual circumstances and preferences), it’s NOT okay to send them at those times. It’s much better to control when the email is sent so that it gets the recipients attention at a time that has highest likelihood of getting the desired outcome or response.

This is just one of the '7 Reasons to Make Use of Delay Delivery’, an article I am working on at the moment – stay tuned for the other 6 reasons in coming weeks.

Meanwhile, what has been your experience dealing with email and other messages on your mobile device ‘after hours’?

All the best,

Steuart Snooks