Should you delete your phone’s email app to boost focus?

Many apps were designed with the promise of making us more productive, efficient and connected. But often these apps are more distracting than not, making it more difficult to focus and even taking away from your social life.

“In fundamental ways, and for the worse, (technology) has shifted our focus,” says Terri R. Kurtzberg, a professor of management and global business at Rutgers Business School. “It’s the curse of the incoming message notification that has done the most damage — studies have shown that seeing the notification flag is as distracting as actually stopping what you’re doing and checking the actual message. Our minds are already gone, wondering what it is.”

Kurtzberg and other cognitive experts have a message for people: Delete the email app (or take significant steps to limit your use of it), and you’ll actually boost focus.

Improving focus

“Emails can be a major distraction if not consciously managed and can compromise task performance, increasing time spent on tasks and perhaps reducing quality,” says Dr. Adel Aziz, a cognitive and behavioral neurologist at JFK University Medical Center. “Work performance needs sustained attention — focus — to complete tasks at hand. This requires limiting distraction.”

But Aziz concedes some jobs, for better or worse, require people to be “on” and aware of frequent updates. Emails have become a default way to communicate, but there’s a reason you’re better off reading and responding to them on a computer.

Kurtzberg studies electronic communication and distraction, and she and her team have found that interacting with your phone is even more distracting than using a laptop, even when performing the same task.

“We believe this is because your phone is more of a social association object — even though many of us do work tasks on it all day long — so having it in your hand is a reminder of the social media you’d like to check or the people you’d like to be chatting with,” she says. “The laptop inspires more of a ‘do whatever it takes’ mindset, while the phone brings out the softer side.”

Often, using your phone for email also triggers you to open other apps, sometimes switching back and forth between responding to a colleague’s question, paying a bill, responding to a Paperless Post toddler birthday invite on behalf of your 18-month-old … and the list goes on.

“When email is one of the many apps on our phones and we’re constantly shifting from app to app as phone notifications pop up, our brains can’t keep up with the chaos,” explains Patricia Boyle, a neuropsychologist with the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center in Chicago and McKnight Brain Research Foundation trustee. “Fast-paced multitasking adds to our cognitive load and negatively impacts attention and focus.”

Also, research suggests that multitasking isn’t even a thing our brains can do. In a 2019 Cerebrum article, neuroscientists Kevin Madore and Dr. Anthony Wagner wrote, “Multitasking is almost always a misnomer, as the human mind and brain lack the architecture to perform two or more tasks simultaneously.”

Instead, Madore and Wagner said we’re evolutionarily wired to “single-task,” so instead of multitasking, we’re just switching from one task to another, potentially to the detriment of work quality, connection and focus.

“Emailing while you’re watching a video on your phone overloads the brain and makes it harder to transition between activities, plan, problem solve and sustain attention,” Boyle adds.

That’s why Canadian researchers found that taking the internet off our phones improved people’s focus — it helped people devote attention to one task at a time. (Oh, they also shaved a decade off their brain’s age.)

An emotional gamble

The idea of deleting your phone’s email app may spike anxiety, especially if you aren’t feeling too hot in other aspects of your life. To some extent, that’s part of the problem.

“When we have a slightly negative feeling state, such as boredom or anxiety or angst, we are drawn to distract ourselves, and we might open our email app,” says Dr. Yann Poncin, an associate professor in the Child Study Center at Yale School of Medicine. “If we compulsively check our email in the early morning or late at night, we activate anxious thoughts, which saps our energy and attention.”

To be fair to email, it’s not the only app that serves as a focus vampire.

“Email and much of technology is reminiscent of gambling,” Poncin says. “Gambling works by having intermittent little victories. … Likewise, your email gives you little hits of satisfaction — ‘dopamine hits’ — the brain molecule that moves you to action with anticipated reward, hits that keep you coming back.”

To delete or not to delete

Despite what she knows about focus and technology, Kurtzberg doesn’t actually recommend completely removing email from your phone. “It doesn’t take too many unpleasant surprises when returning to the email to end up abandoning that practice,” she says.

Instead, she recommends a middle-ground approach that centers on vigilance about notifications. Kurtzberg never gets email notifications on her phone, so she has to consciously open the app to check them. When you check in, ask yourself, “Is this email so important that I must respond now?”

“Most people are surprised to learn how few messages actually need urgent attention, and it can free them up to schedule email checks at periodic moments throughout the day,” she reveals. “This requires a reliable sorting system for incoming messages: For example, by keeping messages marked as unread or flagging them so you know they won’t get lost later.

Aziz says email tools such as SaneBox or Unroll.me can help clean up your inbox, filter less important emails and create summaries of subscription-based content. He also recommends devoting a specific amount of time to email.

“Consider using your calendar for focused work and strictly scheduling email time within that. This way, your calendar is a tool to protect your focus,” he says. “Ultimately, it comes down to controlling when and how you engage with email without compromising your availability or flexibility, especially in a managerial role. However, it’s also about setting boundaries in a way that allows you to be as present and effective as possible when you do engage.”