Microsoft's Outage Showed Me Just How Distracting Email Can Be

I spend a lot of time in email at work - to the detriment of a lot of other stuff, actually. My default setup at work is Outlook on 2/3 of the screen, with Teams on the other 1/3. That's my "background", then I have anything I'm currently working on over the top, like a document or VS Code. During yesterday's Microsoft outage the company I work for had no email, and Teams was working sporadically. So instead of my default behaviour of immediately checking my emails, I opened my to do list and started working through that instead. I was so fucking productive! Outlook is a staple on my machine. I pride myself on having a very organised inbox and calendar. This means I'm constantly checking my emails at work. Which is good, as I'm usually quite responsive, but if I have other tasks to do, they end up taking a backseat. This is usually what happens: I have a break between meetings in my calendar, so I start something from my to do list. An email comes in that I need to take action on, so…

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