December is a weird month for productivity. You’ve got end-of-year reflections happening alongside holiday vacations, quarterly reviews colliding with cookie exchanges, and a pervasive sense that everyone’s just trying to clear their desk before the break. It’s also the perfect time to rethink how email shapes your attention.
Because here’s the thing: most of us operate from a place of FOMO when it comes to our inbox. Fear of Missing Out. What if something urgent comes through? What if someone needs me? What if I miss that critical update buried in the 47th unread message?
I’d like to suggest a different frame: JOMO. The Joy of Missing Out.
Not missing out on work. Not ignoring responsibilities. Missing out on the constant cognitive drain of having your inbox live rent-free in your head. Missing out on the anxiety loop of checking, scrolling, flagging, forgetting. Missing out on the illusion that hyper-responsiveness equals productivity.
The Lie We Tell Ourselves
Most of us check email constantly because of FOMO. It’s anxiety wrapped in habit wrapped in a shiny device that buzzes. We tell ourselves we need to be responsive. That our job demands it. That someone might need us right now.
But let’s reality-check this for a second. How many emails you receive in a given week are genuinely urgent? Not “feels urgent because it’s from someone important” urgent. Actually urgent. The kind where a delay of two hours causes measurable damage.
If you’re honest, it’s probably close to zero.
Most email is just someone else clearing their queue. They wrote it. They sent it. They feel better. Now it’s your problem. And unless your job description explicitly says “respond to all email within 15 minutes or face consequences,” you’re probably operating under self-imposed pressure that nobody actually expects you to maintain.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: email is fake productivity. It’s easy, low-stakes work that gives you the satisfying feeling of being busy while stealing energy from your actual core responsibilities. Inbox Zero feels like an accomplishment until you realize you just spent three hours doing other people’s work instead of your own.
My Turning Point: Focus Blocks and Inbox Drift
I got serious about this a while back when I started using Microsoft Viva Insights to block focus time on my calendar. The idea was simple: protect two-hour chunks for deep work. No meetings. No interruptions. Just me and the thing I actually needed to get done.
It worked great. For about 20 minutes at a time.
Then I’d see the Outlook notification. Just a glance. Just to make sure nothing urgent came in. And suddenly I’m three emails deep into a thread about a meeting next week, and my focus block is now a Swiss cheese block with holes poked through it every time my lizard brain got curious.
The turning point was closing Outlook entirely. Not minimizing it. Not muting notifications. Closing the damn app. Then scheduling dedicated email blocks where I’d open it, process everything, respond to what needed responses, and close it again. Same logic for Teams. Same logic for every other thing that pinged for my attention.
The core lesson: email supports the work. It is not the work itself.
Carl Pullein says it better than I can: “Email is not your core work.” It’s a communication tool. A way to coordinate. A means to an end. But we’ve let it become the end, and we wonder why we feel busy but unproductive.
Containing Email (No Matter Your Job)
“But Doug, my job IS email. I have to be responsive.”
Maybe. But probably not as much as you think.
If your role genuinely requires high responsiveness, you don’t need to be responsive all the time. You need to declare “office hours” for email. Block focused work time in the morning. Process email at 11:00 AM. Check again at 3:00 PM. Done. People adapt. They learn your rhythm. And if something’s truly urgent, they’ll call you or walk over or use whatever channel your organization reserves for actual emergencies.
This is classic Cal Newport territory. The guy built a career on deep work while being a professor, and professors get a shit-ton of email. He survives by containing it.
If you’re in leadership, you have an even bigger responsibility here. Stop sending emails at 8:00 PM. I don’t care if you’re just clearing your head before bed. You’re modeling terrible boundaries and creating an expectation that everyone should be available all the time. Use the delay-send feature. Use Viva Insights to remind you when you’re about to send something outside work hours. Model the behavior you want to see.
And if you’re a student or working in an ecosystem where email shares space with Gmail, Teams, Messenger, Discord, Slack, and seven other apps that all want your attention? Default everything to notifications off. Only exceptions: your mom, your partner, your boss, maybe one close friend. Everyone else can wait.
The Joy of Missing Out in Practice
So what does JOMO actually look like?
It looks like focus. Real focus. The kind where you finish a task and realize an hour passed without you checking your phone.
It looks like presence. You’re in a meeting and you’re actually in the meeting, not half-listening while scanning your inbox under the table.
It looks like clarity. Your mental load drops because your inbox becomes contained. Predictable. Something you visit during designated times rather than something that visits you constantly.
It looks like intentional responses. If something comes in that’s time-sensitive and you happen to see it, you send a quick acknowledgment: “Got it, will respond fully this afternoon.” Then you close the app and get back to your actual work. When your email block arrives, you write the full reply with your brain actually engaged.
The emotional payoff is relief. Clarity. Autonomy. You stop feeling like you’re on call for a job that doesn’t actually require you to be on call. You stop feeling guilty for not checking. You stop feeling overwhelmed by the sheer volume of other people’s priorities landing in your queue.
How to Actually Do This
Alright. Enough philosophy. Here’s the practical stuff.
Step 1: Turn off notifications. All of them. Phone. Desktop. Teams pop-ups. Messenger banners. Every app that thinks it deserves to interrupt your attention. If there’s someone who genuinely needs to reach you urgently, make them an exception. Everyone else can wait.
Step 2: Close the apps between blocks. Don’t just minimize Outlook. Close it. Same with Teams, Slack, whatever. Remove the temptation to drift. If it’s not your designated email time, the app should not be open.
Step 3: Schedule processing blocks. Put them on your calendar. Twice a day is plenty for most people. Morning and afternoon. 30 minutes each if you’re disciplined. An hour if you’ve got a lot of coordination work. Protect the space between these blocks like you’d protect a meeting with your CEO.
Step 4 (Optional, but powerful for a year-end reset): Select all. Mark as read. Clear flags. Archive everything. If you’re nervous about losing something, take 10 minutes to scan for anything truly important and capture it in your notes or task system. Then let it all go.
This is David Allen territory: “The brain is for having ideas, not storing them.” Your inbox is not a filing system. It’s not a task manager. It’s a conveyor belt for incoming communication. Process it. Act on it. Archive it. Move on.
Start Small, Notice the Difference
You don’t need to overhaul your entire system tomorrow. Start with one thing: turn off notifications. Just do that. Then schedule one email block for tomorrow morning. Process everything that’s there. Close the app. Notice how your focus feels different.
If you’re heading into the holidays, consider the Big Reset. Archive everything before you leave. Come back in January with an empty inbox and a clean slate. The world will not end. The urgent stuff will resurface. The rest was never that important to begin with.
Here’s the mindset shift: email is for communicating ideas, not storing them or managing tasks. JOMO is about designing your attention intentionally, not neglecting your responsibility. You’re not ignoring people. You’re respecting your own cognitive capacity and giving your best work the space it deserves.
Try it. Miss out on the constant inbox anxiety. Find out what it feels like to actually focus again.
