3 steps to stop teacher emails taking over your life

You thought you were going into teaching to teach.

Yet, it turns out a significant part of your job is taken up with sending and receiving emails.

The constant ping of emails hitting your inbox can feel overwhelming.

More significantly, it’s incredibly distracting.

When I was teaching, my email notifications would pop up over my PowerPoints so that even my students were distracted by the noise and the visual pop-up.

So that’s me and a bunch of teenagers wondering what’s happening in my inbox. To say we were all temporarily off task would be an understatement.

The thing with email notifications is that they create a dopamine seeking-reward loop. According to Susan Weinschenk Ph.D, a behavioural psychologist, “dopamine causes you to want, desire, seek out, and search.” If there is a cue, such as a pop-up or audio notification, it activates our dopamine system, which pushes us to seek out the source of the noise (the email landing in our inbox) in anticipation of a reward (finding out what the email is and perhaps it being a good email too! Yet, how often does that happen in a teacher’s inbox?)

Over time, this creates a habit loop, Pavlovian in nature, where each time you notice an email notification, your dopamine is activated and you are pushed to seek out the cause of the notification.

This leads to two things.

First, you’re spending more of your time on emails, which isn’t the primary purpose of any teacher.

Second, you are being distracted from the task that you were originally doing.

You know the feeling. You were in the middle of a task, the email notification comes through. You switch over to your emails; read it, think about it, respond to it. And then you emerge from your inbox several minutes later wondering what on earth you were doing.

Emails literally rob you of your valuable time.

In fact, a study from the University of California Irvine, found that when you respond to a seemingly small interruption like an email, “it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to the task.”

That’s nearly half an hour.

How many books could you mark in that time?

How much of a lesson plan could you prepare in that time?

How many other tasks could you have been doing in that time?

Emails are brilliant but they are a big distraction.

So, here’s three steps you can take today to stop your teacher emails taking over your life.

1) Switch off the notifications

If at this point in the article you haven’t already popped onto your emails and switched off all of the notifications, then do so now.

If someone so desperately wants to get hold of you, they have a timetable of where you’ll be most of the time during the school day. They’ll come find you.

2) Allocate a set time when you deal with your emails

In order to dampen the dopamine drive to find out what’s happening in your inbox, dedicate a set time each day where you will read and respond to your emails. This becomes a period of the day that you might look forward to (there is something exciting about checking your emails. Every now and then you get a good one!)

The aim here is to make sure that when you deal with your emails, you handle both ends of the email loop: you give yourself enough time to read the emails and respond. The worst thing you can do is read an email and think, “I’ll come back to that later". This creates an ongoing distraction in your mind and doesn’t actually shift the email to “done” in your mind.

If you worry that others may be waiting for your response, set up an automatic response, which tells them your working hours and the times that you usually respond to your emails. Set your own boundaries with this such as, “I aim to respond within 48 hours”.

3) No emails before bed

I do understand this temptation. The life of a teacher is so fast that it can sometimes seem wise to have a heads up of what is coming down the line towards you the following day.

However, instead this creates distraction and mind racing. Having fed your brain a snippet of information, it now chooses the time you are meant to be sleeping as time to instead chew over this new information.

Give yourself a fighting chance of having a good night’s sleep and put the school laptop away at least an hour before bed.

And if you have your school emails on your phone?

Is this your personal or work phone? Because if it is the former, why have you got anything to do with work on it?

Be brave and delete the email app from your phone. Give yourself the opportunity to switch off from school when you are not there.

I hope these three tips are helpful to you.

How do you manage your email notifications? Share in the comments below.

Gemma Drinkall is an Educational Wellbeing Coach dedicated to helping middle leaders in education to create clear boundaries so that they can thrive in teaching. To receive 5 free tips that will help you to switch off from teaching and switch on in your life, click here.