I feel like I’ve been talking a lot about dopamine lately, but a thought I recently had was that going through emails seems to give me a nice hit of it.
Or, possibly more accurately: thinking about doing emails gives me the dopamine, and each time I move on to a new one, I get a little more.
And that’s part of why it has been one of the bedrocks of my productivity, I think. It’s not that hard for “going through emails” to compete with “messing around on my phone” because it triggers a similar neural pathway. Or something, I don’t know, I’m not a brain scientist.
I’ve discussed here in the past how my email habits are actually some of the most useful and consistent that I’ve developed. It does wonders for my productivity. I’m able to just blast through all emails without really needing any “willpower,” and it really isn’t very cognitively demanding.
I’m not totally sure why that is. Could it be that all established habits provide these same benefits?
Honestly, a life where I do everything productive with minimal effort and can coast through on “auto-pilot” for the difficult things sounds pretty good.
I guess I need to really start focusing on habits again in order to test this theory.