Email can quickly become the great time stealer. When you ought to be finishing a proposal or checking your financials or starting that presentation, do you ever find that you are instead taking a peek at your emails? And then finding that the peek has turned into 90 minutes? In business we often deal with interruptions to the flow. A phone call might interrupt a meeting or a client might call in the middle of your preparation time. But when you’re at your desk and ready to work, the call of the email can be insidious, luring you away from productivity.
What can you do to stay on top of email while also staying productive? Here are a few tips:
- Use spam filters so you won’t be distracted by junk
- Create rules in your email so that mail is routed to the appropriate folder. This will help you prioritize your email time so you are most effective. Messages in the Customers folder might receive higher priority than subscriptions to your sports web site, for example.
- Set time blocks for you to respond to email and STICK WITH the time limits. If you need to deal with email first thing in the morning, then set aside a 30 minute block to deal with urgent messages at the beginning of the day. When 30 minutes are up, move on. Then perhaps right before or right after lunch you can set aside another block of time to catch up with emails. Depending on the volume of email, you might need one more time block in the afternoon, perhaps right before quitting time.
For many of us, communicating via email is an integral part of our jobs and the ability to quickly communicate with others is essential to getting and keeping clients. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t stay on top of email AND focus on the other parts of the business as needed. Try these tips or modify them to your needs and see if you aren’t more productive.
