It's a reliable rule of office life that any email marked urgent - with a red exclamation mark, or a "Please read", or similar - can be safely ignored for days, and possibly for ever. A few of those who send them are, presumably, self-important and do it all the time. But mostly it's a sign of insecurity: the sender knows only too well that their message is one you'd otherwise have every reason to neglect. That exclamation mark is a declaration of war. It says: I know better than you how you should apportion your attention to get your work done.
But "urgent" emails are only the most obvious manifestation of an endemic phenomenon. The battle to decide what merits your attention at any moment is a constant, low-level war of all against all. You might believe it's always you who chooses what to focus on, or your boss, yet in a normal workplace, countless voices - superiors, underlings, clients, random emailers - compete to control your concentration. We complain of having too many things to do. But how much of that overworked feeling is really resentment that it wasn't you who got to decide those things were important?
This, the management guru Peter Drucker argued, is a distinctive problem of modern "knowledge work". When you're ploughing a field or shoeing a horse, the answer to the question "What's the most important thing for me to be doing right now?" is usually obvious: it can't be fought over. Not so in the blurry world of ideas, hence Drucker's maxim that if you're a knowledge worker, defining your work - staying aware of what genuinely deserves your attention - is the most crucial work you'll do. This (as noted on the productivity podcast precisionchange.com) is why "information overload" is a questionable complaint: if we couldn't handle vast amounts of information, we'd have a break-down each time we stepped into nature, or a busy street. The real trouble is that we have defined too many things as worthy of having the power to distract us.
The best "time management" strategies are about reclaiming this power. Spending the first hour of the day (or more) on a major project before you check email - Brian Tracy's advice in Eat That Frog! - is one example: that way, you start the morning by putting yourself, not the incoming flow of attention-demands, in the driving seat. Alternatively, make it harder for others to seize your focus: AwayFind.com offers ingenious ways to make it slightly more laborious to email you on holiday, so people won't do so lightly.
The deeper truth - noted too glibly in self-help books, but still true - is that in reality it's always you who's choosing what you're doing. You're 100% free to disobey a boss, refuse a task, quit a job; you have only to live with the consequences. It's always a choice. That's cold comfort, of course, if your choice is between doing appalling work and starving. But too often we live as if that's the case, when really, on closer inspection, it isn't.
• oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
