Member-only story
I Think I’m Addicted to My Emails
I need to figure out a balance between efficiency and sanity before it kills me.
It was 7 o’clock in the evening, and I was hitting refresh on my emails. In my defence, I was working, and there was information that I needed to extract so that I could do my job. Then it was 10 o’clock at night, and I was hitting refresh on my emails. I checked my primary inbox, my “save for later” inbox and even my spam inbox. After the third time in 10 minutes, I realised that I had a problem.
There is a very fine line between being dedicated and being obsessed. I’m currently working two jobs. My first job said they were slowing down and would have to cut my hours to part-time, so I found a second part-time job. But the slowdown never happened so I’m trying to squeeze work in whenever I can. Last week I was asked to put together a schedule right as I was leaving and I said yes, but that it would have to be that evening because I had to go to my second job. When Monday arrived, I was scolded for sending out an email late on a Friday because nobody checks that. I was told that I should have texted each person instead. Here’s the catch; nobody wants to get a work-related text message at 10 PM on a Friday. It’s a really tricky double-standard where I am expected to be reachable at all times, but how dare I impose on someone else’s free time?
