Last night I had a flash of what life was like before mega connectedness. Our internet was down because of a local power outage and they didn’t get it fixed for a day and a half.

At first I was upset to have to be disconnected from life and my business for so long. So I took advantage of the time by catching up on business reading and writing. During that time, I realized I’ve gotten somewhat re-addicted to checking email and Facebook. Not as a way to do business, but subconsciously as a way to avoid completing the tasks I need to be doing.

About 2 years ago, I began a new ritual of only checking email twice a day and social media once a day. I’d done well for a while and have recently fallen back into the bad habit of checking too often, distracting me from more productive tasks.

When the outage forced me to do without email and social media, as the day went on, I began to feel freedom. I actually became happy the outage happened. I had one of my more productive, focused and fun days in a while.

Want to try it out? Here’s how to get back the productivity of life before mega connectedness of constant email.

Train people what to expect when they contact you. It was different when our main mode of communication was the phone. You can’t call someone every time you have a random thought. Can you imagine how rude that would be? People can however, email every time they have a random thought. And they do…

It’s your responsibility to ensure they know how to communicate with you. If they email you 3 or more times a day, answer once a day with a compilation of responses rather than become part of the problem, emailing back reactively with separate responses.

This may take a little while to get used to, as we’re all now well-ingrained into the habit of communicating with each other reactively rather than mindfully. But it’s worth it when you feel the peace that comes without automatically defaulting to checking your email every time you sit down to work. And then realizing an hour later, after you’re putting out all kinds of small, insignificant fires, that you haven’t even begun what you sat down to do.

Try it for one entire work day. Seriously, choose one time (or two maximum) during the day when you’ll check and respond to your email and see what happens. As an entrepreneur, I do have to be in contact with my team during the day and we do that from within a virtual office space, so I’m not going into my email and getting distracted from a bunch of other things pulling at my sleeve. And we’ve created a culture of getting down to business rather than sharing fun (and extremely distracting) stuff.

Don’t check your email at night. This is your time with your family or with your self. I know it seems like asking a lot, but this can free you. Just try it – you’ll thank me later when your productivity and peace of mind increase.