I deleted my email app – and my sleep suddenly improved

As a freelance writer, the structure of my work day can vary wildly. Sometimes, it feels as if I have too much to do – other days, too little.

Yet no matter the shape of my 9 to 5, one thing remains constant: emails. I receive about 100 a day, ranging from the inane (Tesco Clubcard updates) to the infuriating (the PR who keeps sending me the fluctuating numbers of Taylor Swift’s Instagram following) and the important (editors, often wondering when the piece they have asked me to write might materialise).

Typically, the first thing I do after turning off my phone alarm in the morning is check my emails – and the last thing I do before I put my phone away at night is open my email app to clear any unread missives. Throughout the day, my phone buzzes and, always assuming it’s something important, I check it.

About a year ago, I found the tic of email-checking had become more distracting than usual. I would spend each morning toilet scrolling to respond to overnight messages and, when I sat at my computer to work, I found myself nervously checking my phone for unread emails every time I hit a mental block. I also accessed emails on my computer, but, for some reason, I would end up looking at the push notifications of my phone app twice as often.

Worst of all, when I took time out to eat lunch or go for a walk, that habit of checking or anticipating the buzz of a message would come with me, making my breaks an extension of the work day.

‘I was always contactable – but at what cost?’

The little red dot next to my Gmail app had become a marker of my professional persona: the higher the number of unread emails, the more I felt as if I wasn’t doing a good job. As long as I was quick to respond to the people who needed me, I told myself, I would keep being seen as reliable by my paymasters and therefore worthy of the work I needed to pay my electricity bill, so I could charge my phone, read my emails and carry on the endless cycle.

Except speed doesn’t always mean quality. I was always contactable – but at what cost? I had begun responding too quickly, taking on too much work and not leaving myself space to think about the worth of what I was producing. The content machine churned and I was busy, spewing word salad on to the internet.

Something needed to change. After a particularly frantic week of nonstop emailing, I decided to delete the email app on my phone.

The first few days without the buzz of notifications made me feel skittish – I worried I was missing out on opportunities and checked emails on my laptop as much as I could instead. When I took breaks, though, the difference was immediately noticeable. As I was physically away from my computer, I found myself forced to think of things other than work, or simply not think at all. I began to rest and reset better. My quality of sleep improved, the lingering content of night-time messages no longer playing on my mind.

Now, my work days are still unpredictable, but I have realised that a lack of structure needn’t stop me setting boundaries for myself. Uninterrupted breaks help me focus when I get back to work and I have found that leaving a few hours, rather than minutes, to respond to a message often makes no difference to the sender and allows me to digest its content properly.

I am still surviving as a freelancer in a fast-paced industry, but I feel less overwhelmed knowing that I can take space when I need it. Now, I can spend my time endlessly checking my phone for Instagram stories and X spats instead.

Looking for more ways to lessen the digital overload? Elle Hunt spoke to the experts for advice on how to switch off while still staying on top of things.

Protect your boundaries | It’s tempting to reply to emails as soon as you receive them, but this can intensify others’ expectations and negatively affect your ability to switch off from work, says Dave Cook, an anthropologist at University College London. “It signals ‘I’m always available’, and this just escalates and compounds.” To manage the flow of email, Cook suggests introducing different kinds of boundaries: temporal, digital and social. You could start going for a walk over your lunch break and leaving your phone behind; introduce filters for incoming messages and limit notifications from your email inbox; or switch to using different devices for personal and work tasks. Once you have introduced some boundaries, communicate them – and be prepared to revise them if necessary, Cook says because “they’re constantly being bombarded and eroded”.

Be considered | While email is a necessary evil of modern work, there are smarter ways of using it. Cook points to the Email Charter, a set of guidelines developed in 2011 that recommend brevity, clarity and consideration. “It’s about respecting other people’s time, but before you can do that, you have to respect your own,” he says. You can detail your working hours and availability in your professional email signature, keep emails short and to the point, and communicate when your correspondent should expect delays (or, alternatively, when you need a speedy response). “If you’re asking an open-ended question, you really need to be picking up a phone,” says Cook.

Recognise the bigger problem | It’s natural to feel overwhelmed by email, particularly in an economic downturn. Throw in the culture of availability, fostered by tech developers, and “fighting against these things is almost like trying to stop the tide from coming in,” says Cook. If your colleagues are uniformly struggling with email, it suggests an organisational issue that needs to be tackled from the top down. Some unions are also starting to push for guidelines around workplace communications and legislation protecting workers’ “right to disconnect”. “It’s capitalism that we’re talking about here – it’s a self-replicating system, so we do need to put in safeguards,” says Cook.