No email? Fantastic!

I have just spent a day without access to email and I loved it!
This weekend the utility company cut off our office power supply for emergency works which meant our email server was shut down. I worked from home on Sunday designing a planning workshop for a client (that must be delivered before Christmas so it's fairly urgent). Normally when I am working I will periodically check my emails (maybe once an hour) but inevitably I read things that need to be actioned and so I am effectively changing from subject to subject, with only short bursts of time on any one issue. Without email I was amazed how enjoyable it was to lose myself in one subject, and how much more relaxing it was to fully engage with the task in hand and not try to ignore other issues and problems. Now that power is restored of course things are back to normal but I am going to try and turn my email off, block out several hours in my diary and really concentrate next time I have a complex task to do, because I want to retain this feeling of relaxed accomplishment. As project managers we are frequently praised for our ability to multiple-task, but perhaps we don't need to manage every task simultaneously, and a little bit more linear progression will speed up our progress through our To Do lists.