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One of the Most Powerful Buttons in Your Inbox for Productivity
That tiny “unsubscribe” button is the key to staying on track for your goals.
Like many people, the first thing I do when I wake up is to check my inbox. But before I start responding to emails, I spend about 3 minutes deleting dozens of junk emails. These include emails from retailers alerting me to the latest sales, random updates from businesses that I no longer patronize, and pleas from organizations that I have no idea how I ended up on their mailing list.
Sure, 3 minutes isn’t a long time but added up over the course of a year, that’s over 18 hours of lost productivity.
I want to pause here and address the concept of productivity. As a society, we place enormous value on being productive. But as argued by organizational psychologist and Wharton professor Adam Grant, productivity is simply a means of achieving your goals — it is not a virtue in and of itself.
Grant further suggests that “Productivity isn’t about time management. It’s about attention management.” Rather than obsessing over trying to check off as many tasks as possible on our to-do list, we would be better served to prioritize the people and projects that matter and then get comfortable spending as much time as necessary on them.
“Productivity isn’t about…
