Be Sane and Sensible – Determine When and How Often to Access Your Email

Posted on July 14th, 2009, by Meggin McIntosh, Ph.D.

Many folks are just not sane and sensible about their email – and it ends up controlling them instead of them controlling it! Here is one important sane and sensible suggestion:

DETERMINE when you will check and respond to email. If you are like the average professional today – and you put this notion into practice, you can reduce the time you spend daily on email by nearly 50%. Let’s look at this more carefully…

Reduce the number of times you check email - and certainly do not have it on ALL DAY. That is just inviting interruption, distraction, and wasteful expenditures of your time and energy. Although I will not give you an absolute number, if you can get away with once a day, then do so, For most professionals, 3 – 5 times per day will suffice. This means that regardless of whether you’re checking email at the office or on your iPhone, Blackberry, or whatever, DO NOT check more often than once per hour. Here’s a second aspect of ‘determine:’

Determine your own energy clock and set times for working with email that are in sync with your level of productivity. If you are maximally sharp first thing in the morning, ask yourself if it makes sense for you to be using that most focused, productive time on your email. And please note: there are so many different types of email – and if you’ve determined that some of them require significant mental sharpness and creativity, then address those during your best times.

Don’t sit down to ‘work on your email’ unless you actually have the energy and time to make decisions. You may have observed others (or yourself) as they sit down to ‘work on’ email. They open an email, read it, don’t do anything about it because either they don’t have time or they don’t have the energy, and then they just click on the next one. This is an outrageous way to ‘spend’ your precious time – because you’ve accomplished nothing.

Right now, determine how many times each day are sane and sensible for you to be checking your email. 1, 3, 5…maybe 7. No more than that. And know that you may very well need to educate those around you about your practice and your recommendation for their email practices. The more we are all productive…the more we are all productive.

And if you would like additional ways of getting and staying productive, then please join others (worldwide) who receive Meggin’s weekly emails (and see what is available for download at no cost at the following websites):

**Top Ten Productivity Tips (http://www.TopTenProductivityTips.com)

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(c) 2009 by Meggin McIntosh, Ph.D., “The Ph.D. of Productivity”(tm). Through her company, Emphasis on Excellence, Inc., Meggin McIntosh changes what people know, feel, dream, and do. Sound interesting? It is!