BT21: FOMI: the fear of missing information. Are you suffering from e-mail and information overload? Let me show you how to take control of your inbox and get your life back

Adam Bray

University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust, Bristol, UK

E-mail is boring and tedious but has become central to work. We know there is important, crucial and irrelevant information in our inbox, but which is which, and how do we process it in the time available? How many e-mails are in your inbox? Can you find things when you need them? Are you suffering from fear of missing information (FOMI)? Are you bewildered by Microsoft 365? Why has e-mail become a substitute for work? E-mail eats up more and more valuable time and threatens our scarce resources. The problem with e-mail is our inbox becomes someone else’s to-do list, and stops us from prioritizing properly. Have you ever started your day going through e-mails, and hours later you haven’t finished, haven’t done any of the important things you intended to, and you’re still worried you’ve missed something crucial? How did that make you feel? For some of us this is a daily occurrence. How does that contribute to our constant simmering stress levels? How does it affect our overall satisfaction with our work and our home life? What is it that you worry about most when you come back from holiday? Like a messy desk, never clearing your e-mail inbox contributes to a feeling of constantly being overwhelmed. So we check them more often, check work e-mails while with our families, making us irritable and impacting our quality time. But have you noticed that e-mail is a positive feedback loop? The more often you check it, the more you send, the more e-mail you get, but has that saved you time or helped you achieve more? This is a form of madness. It doesn’t have to be this way. Don’t let your e-mail be a to-do list that anyone else can add to. Drawing from the latest literature on productivity and information technology I will describe sustainable strategies for dealing with work and home e-mails quickly and efficiently so you can prioritize, and choose how you spend your time. We will cover some practical technology tips to help you take immediate action. We will address tactics to clear your inbox and maintain inbox zero using tools already available to you. We will look at habits and specific types of apps that can assist you to focus on what you need when you need it, and store it for easy retrieval in future. How calming and empowering would it feel to achieve a clear inbox, know you have not missed anything important, consistently spend less time on e-mails and find things when you need them. Your time is precious. You need to spend less time on e-mail. Let’s look at how you can achieve that.