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I typically check mine in the morning, at lunch,
and at the end of the workday. And that’s only if I’m involved in active
open-loop communications. If I don’t have any active open loops, then I’ll
usually check email once or twice a day. Handle your email in batches to
increase your efficiency. Experiment with
how often you really need to check email. Realize that you’re paying a
productivity price the more often you check it. Curiosity is not a good enough
reason to check email. Have a legitimate business reason for checking email as
often as you do. See how infrequently you can push it without causing problems.
For many people once a day or even once every two days will work just fine.
Once you check email in the morning, promise
yourself that you won’t check it again until the end of the day, and set a
specific time. I’ll check my email twice today, so I won’t check it again until
after 6:00pm. If it’s before that time, I won’t allow myself to check it.
If you get addicted to checking your email too
often, you can help break the habit by making it harder to run your email
program. Remove the program icon from your desktop and your quick launch bar, so
you have to hunt for it on the Start Menu. Or make yourself launch Explorer and
navigate to find the icon from there. Adding extra steps can help break the
pattern of impulse checking. And if that still doesn’t work, setup your email on
a separate PC like a laptop that you must boot up every time you want to check
email.
2. Use email only for non-urgent
communication.
Don’t turn email into an urgency-driven
communication tool. It’s not designed for that. If time is of the essence, then
pick up the phone. Now that you can get unlimited long distance for $25/month
from companies like Vonage (also check out Skype), there’s no reason to be
stingy with the phone.
If you have others pressuring you to check your
email more often than once or twice a day, such as people that get frustrated if
they don’t get a reply from you within an hour or two, then you need to push
back. Let such people know that they should never use email for truly urgent
communication with you — if they need a fast reply, they must pick up the phone
or visit you in person (if you’re both co-located).
3. Disable email checking on program startup.
Don’t set your email program to auto-check
email every time you launch the program. You want to be able to send an email at
any time during the day without automatically checking email too. You may often
need to send emails during the day as part of various tasks, but you don’t need
to check email at those times. Check email only when there’s a legitimate reason
for checking.
4. Log your email usage.
Create an email log, and record how often you
check email. You can do this with a sheet of paper. Just record the start and
stop times whenever you run your email program. Do it for about a week, and see
how much time you’re spending on email. Is it worth it? If you’re checking your
email more than 20 times a week without a legitimate reason, you’re wasting way
too much time. Try giving yourself a daily or weekly email checking quota, and
once you hit it, you can’t check your email anymore until the next day/week when
your quota resets. Offer yourself a reward like going to see a movie or going
out to dinner the first week you come in under quota.
Email is a powerful business and personal
communication tool, but it’s easily abused. Why? Because it’s so easy. Checking
and answering email is something you know you can do, so it provides an
immediate sense of accomplishment. But it’s a hollow victory, and if you spend
your days masterfully checking and answering email, you’ll go nowhere and crowd
out those actions that could really move you ahead.
Replace frivolous email abuse with purposeful
intention. Use it to enhance your productivity instead of to destroy it.
Consciously scrutinize the way you use email, decide what legitimate role it
will play in your life, and set boundaries to enforce that role.
Copyright © Steve Pavlina
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