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

14 November 2026  |  3 min read

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:

1. I have a break between meetings in my calendar, so I start something from my to do list.
2. An email comes in that I need to take action on, so I park the thing I'm working on and get stuck into the latest fire drill.
3. My to do item gets put back to another day when I have more time.

I'm a very organised person, so my shit always gets squared away - I rarely "drop a ball", but the constant context switching can be very tiring. There's been a tonne of research¹ done about context switching and how bad it can be for your productivity, and by Microsoft kindly removing the main culprit for my context switching yesterday, it really helped. I pretty much cleared out my entire to do list in a single day!

So what now?

I think I'm going to change up how I do things. I'll still keep Teams open, as it's how people get hold of me when they need me urgently, but I'm pretty good at ignoring Teams until I'm ready to chat.

Outlook is trickier though, as I use it so much for my calendar too. Teams has my calendar, but it doesn't display category colours (told you I was organised!) so I'll need to work around that. But my plan is to keep Outlook closed and only open it a couple times per day to check email. I'm hoping that this will keep me more focused on the task I'm currently working on.

I'm not sure how long this will last, or if it will work at all, as my method of working with Outlook is pretty much muscle memory at this point, but we shall see. It'll be an interesting experiment.

Do you have manage your inbox in a similar way? If so, let me know using the reply button below - I'm always interested in learning new productivity tips.

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