Jess Lively

[Please note, this July Email Intervention Group is closed, anyone added after 7/7/11 will not be included on the Email Intervention emails going out this month. Please sign up for the August Intervention! Details to come.]

After my epiphany about how email was tying me to my career 119 hours a week, I could tell immediately that this situation is something that many of us share. In our hopes to be on top of things socially and in our careers, we’ve created deeply ingrained patterns that (at least for me) have come at the expense of other parts of our lives.

Being present in my own life outside of work on nights and weekends has eroded as I’ve kept an ever watchful eye on my inbox. Back when I had a Blackberry I was practically a Pavlovian dog staring at my phone for six seconds every moment I could just to see if that little red light would go off. Then I upgraded to a smart phone. And though the little light is thankfully no longer present, I continued to check my inbox every 10-30 minutes from the minute my alarm went off in the morning to the minute my head hit the pillow at night.

Though this seemingly harmless habit didn’t infringe on the things I did in my off hours, the near constant contemplation about email, responses to be made, and work to be done during the next workday weighed on my mind and tied me to my job most hours of the day.

But the good news is that I’ve realized this is a pattern I can break, and I want to help others like me, do the same.

Introducing the Email Intervention

To help those who share my email addiction, I’ve created a two week pledge to help curb the obsession. The idea is simple, those who want to participate with me in breaking free of email on nights and weekends will take a break from email checking after hours for fourteen days. My hope is that by doing so, we can all become a little less distracted from the other important areas of our lives that exist outside our office walls.

And feel free to tweak and customize this pledge to work with your life. If you separate your personal and professional email accounts, feel free to check your personal accounts after work, but remember, the ultimate aim is to be completely present when you are doing other things in your life. Dinner with friends means not checking Twitter, blogging for fun means looking at your stats in that moment only, and texting and calling your friends and family directly is encouraged. The main point is to make sure that your pledge helps you become more engaged in your everyday life.

How You Can Participate

If you’d like to take the Email Intervention Pledge with me, please comment on this post. I am in the process of creating four emails (yes, I know, I’m using emails but they are intended to be checked during office hours) that will have tips, tricks, and reflections on the process of re-engaging in our personal lives. These emails will be sent out throughout the two week Email Intervention this July and on upcoming Interventions in the following months.

The July Email Intervention pledge class will take place July 11th – July 25th. During these two weeks we will all take a stand together to break the off hours inbox checking. We will have other pledge classes going on each month going forward as well. So if this month’s pledge timing doesn’t work with your schedule, feel free to wait until the next batch in August.

To help honor my own commitment to breaking this habit, I am pledging to continue to not check email on nights and weekends until 1,000 people take the Email Intervention pledge with me.

Please Spread the Word

Interested? Excited? Elated?

Feel free to help me spread the word and help us all reconnect more deeply in our personal lives by sharing this post to friends and family (hey, co-workers count too). Wouldn’t it be a great pledge for offices to take together? Feel free to use the header above to share online and also feel free to grab the badge buttons below. You are welcome to post or tweet them anywhere you like and you can link it back to this post so others can find out more and take the pledge themselves.

Remember, all it takes is a comment on this post pledging to not check email after work (or your own customized pledge) during July 11th – July 25th. And be on the lookout for the four helpful emails from me as we go on this journey together!

[Please note, this July Email Intervention Group is closed, anyone added after 7/7/11 will not be included on the Email Intervention emails going out this month. Please sign up for the August Intervention! Details to come.]