Email is a Keystone Habit

Keystone habits have the power to start a chain reaction, changing and improving other habits as they spread to an individual’s or team’s working practices.

These are habits that start to shift, dislodge and remake other patterns. It seems that some habits are more powerful than others in helping to change and improve the status quo.
 
Keystone habits start a process that, over time, transforms everything, and where success doesn't depend on getting every single thing right, but relies instead on identifying a few key priorities and using them to powerfully leverage your effectiveness.
 
The keystone habit that transformed Alcoa

Charles Duhigg writes about this in his book ‘The Power of Habit’ where he tells the story of the giant American company Alcoa appointing Paul O'Neill as it's CEO in 1987. At the time, O'Neill's focus was on the one single habit that he believed would change the rest of the organisation. In this case, he focused on the habit of excellence that would be measured in the number of workplace injuries.
 
As Duhigg writes, before O'Neill's arrival, almost every Alcoa plant had at least one accident per week. Once his safety plan was implemented, some facilities would go years without a single employee losing a workday due to an accident. He did this by attacking this one habit and then watching the changes ripple throughout the organisation.
 
When he retired in the year 2000, the company’s annual net profit was five times higher than when he arrived and its value had risen by 27 billion dollars.

In the same way, I believe that email is the one habit that, when mastered, can have a ripple effect on so many other habits that impact on our workplace productivity and performance.

Change the habit of your working style

One critically important aspect of the email habit is the way that we start the day. So many of us will check email first thing in the morning and this is the very first habit I teach people to change in my coaching and training programs. The way we start the day has a tremendous influence on what sort of day that we will have.

Starting the day in the inbox means your focus is on other peoples priorities. Someone has once said that the inbox is your To-Do list, but everybody else writes on it. And how often do we start there and find it is half an hour, half a morning or half a day before we get to the calendar to see our real and important work?
 
It's a much better habit to start our day in the calendar view of your email program. This way, we're able to see our pre-existing appointments, commitments and priorities before we view any new inputs that have arrived overnight or early in the morning. This gives us a big picture perspective of our overall workload before we drop into the detail and minutiae of the day. It allows us to make better quality decisions when we do visit the inbox, and add them to the context of our broader workload.
 
A key to creating a good new habit

James Clear writes in his book ‘Atomic Habits’ that there are four keys to breaking a bad habit and creating a good habit. The first of these is to make the good habit we want to establish highly visible or obvious and the bad habit invisible. That's why I advocate setting up the default view of our email software to make the calendar visible and the inbox invisible, so we start the day focused on our higher-order tasks and activities – many of which arrived via email yesterday, last week or even last month.

Most of us start the day checking the bright, shiny, new, loud and seemingly urgent messages in the inbox and wonder why we’re struggling to keep up with the important work that is sitting quietly in our calendar.
 
This keystone habit of starting the day in the calendar (rather than inbox) can have a positive ripple effect that shifts our working style from one that is inbox-based, interruption-driven and reactive to one that is calendar-based, plan-driven and proactive. More relaxed. More productive. More satisfying. Which would you prefer?