Email is an amazing productivity tool. It allows us to keep in touch with clients and colleagues at all hours of the day and night, and while phone calls and face-to-face meetings still have their place, it’s much more efficient than these other forms of communication.

However, as with most things in life, email should be used—or at least checked—in moderation. When we check email too often, it can actually make us less productive.

How much is too much?

It’s difficult to say how often we should be checking email and how much is too much because the answer will vary from person to person. But, as Lifehack.org points out, if we feel we need to “respond to an email within 5 minutes” or check email every time our phone or computer dings, we could be doing ourselves more harm than good. That’s because, as well all know, “There’s a difference between being busy and being productive.” If checking email frequently doesn’t help us do our job better but instead interrupts important work, that’s probably too often.

Why do we check it so often?

If we want to change the unproductive habit of checking email constantly, it’s helpful to know why we do it. Psychology Today provides us with some insights, noting seven reasons that people check email so frequently: 

1. To avoid getting behind: Because answering emails often involves decision-making, people like to check emails frequently so they don’t have to make too many decisions at once.
2. It’s a distraction: Answering emails is often easier than focusing on more productive work, so people do this because it’s “mentally easier than a lot of the alternatives.”
3. A desire to be conscientious: Answering emails quickly seems like the polite thing to do, and some people feel that responding quickly will impress their boss. Ironically, though, “If you're checking email all the time, you're probably being a less productive member of your team than if you weren't.”
4. FOMO: The fear of missing out is very real. People feel they have to respond right away to opportunities or they may miss their chance.
5. It's just a bad habit: Whether checking emails frequently is actually benefiting us or not, many people do it out of habit. The good news is that bad habits can be broken and replaced with good habits.
6. To fill up our downtime: Many people fee anxious or stressed when they have nothing to do, so checking email is a way to fill that void. 
7. Underestimating the “hidden drains of email”: Because scanning an email only takes a few seconds, people fail to recognize how much time they waste reading junk emails (or re-reading them if they don’t make a decision the first time they see them).

How do we stop?

So do you check email too often? Yes? Good! The first step is admitting you have a problem. But how do we break the habit and stop checking emails so often? Business Insider shares four tips to help us stop checking emails so frequently.

1. Make email easier to miss or harder to access: There are several ways to do this, like turning off notifications, removing the email icon from your task bar, or even downloading an app that blocks access to email on a temporary basis. 
2. Schedule time to complete your top priorities: When we’re clear about our priorities and actually schedule time to complete them, we’re more likely to focus on important tasks and less likely to turn to email as a distraction. If we do have important emails we need to respond to, they should be added to the list and assigned an appropriate priority level.
3. Have a transition plan: Because people often check email out of habit when they complete a task, having a transition plan, a plan of what to do when a task is completed, can be helpful. For example, if our transition plan is to return to our to-do list to determine the next priority, we can make that our new routine instead of immediately checking emails, getting distracted, and forgetting about our priorities.
4. Don’t get stressed out: People with a lot of work to do sometimes get stressed and revert to their bad habits. But if we’re working on our highest priority task, we’ll tend to be less stressed. The article closes with this tip: “The most productive people do what they feel is most important more of the time than anyone else. They avoid being dragged along by subconscious forces that constantly redirect their attention. Check email when you intend to — when it is the highest priority — and stay out of your inbox the rest of the time.”

Brokers need to manage their time wisely

The fourth quarter is the busy time of year, and that’s true whether you sell Medicare, individual, or group policies. Some agents sell all three. To be successful, we need to be excellent at time management. Getting control of our emails and learning to prioritize correctly is a great first step.