43 Folders, a blog on productivity and organizing, has an interesting entry on the distraction caused by email notification. In the course of writing this email I’ve been dinged three times and it’s interesting to consider what this does to work flow. I receive a fair amount of email (around 100 messages a day) most of which is CCed and does not require a response. Still, often I will stop what I’m doing to check on it, derailing my train of thought. I’ll have to try out the ding-less experiment!
I have tried filtering any note that I am cc:ed on to a ‘cc’ folder which I check about 3 times a day. It seems to work but I have had to do a bit of work ‘training’ others to work within this constraint.