Recently, it was reported that, one in three adults checks their emails in the middle of the night! Putting aside questions of 'Why?' and comments like 'Get a life (even when you should be asleep)', there is the question of what this is like if viewed slightly differently - that is, if viewed 'aslant'.
As noted on 'The News Quiz' (BBC Radio 4 - 15th May 2015), checking emails is like going to one's front door and looking to see if anybody is there. It is like going out and asking the post/mail man if there is anything in his bag. (There are post/mail women, of course, but ours is male.)
Where I live, the post/mail man only comes once a day (and never on a Sunday), so why should it not be the same for the (virtual) email (man)? It only takes a bit of discipline and self-control.
I close the email application on my work PC after I have used it and only open it again to check for emails at times convenient to me. I do not have an alert sounding every time something arrives - unlike my colleague who's computer goes 'dink' quite regularly. If there is anything urgent about which I need to be informed, there is always the 'phone (which, in my office, I keep in a drawer behind where I sit).
When working at home, I never have an email application open and only check to see if there is an alert on my tablet when I am not doing anything else - and feel like checking. I do not have what can only be described as an email-checking habit - which is a polite way of saying 'addiction'. In fact, I probably have the opposite. Indeed, when the 'phone at home rings, I rarely answer it unless I am expecting a call.
(At home, I do open the front door - on Fridays to pay the milkman and on other days to tell people politely - or in the case of Mormons, impolitely - to go away.)
