Email Time saver…..
Did we ever anticipate the amount of email that we would be sending and receiving when it first started? No way. The fact is the “office” has changed from a place to any-place as the internet and email are available anywhere, anytime. The messages keep coming at us and we keep responding, or letting it pile up, or getting stressed out.
It is interesting to see the major time management gurus beginning to address this shift in our culture. I will share that the core principles of time management still apply even with this explosion of messaging.
Stop reading email as it comes in.
Instead read it periodically.
Scattered email reading is really a time waster. There is tons of research on multi-tasking and interruptions which show over and over that interruptions take up to 10 minutes to recover. So imagine you are concentrating on something and also constantly flipping to your email, responding, filing, deleting, forwarding and more. The time it takes to go back to your original project and get your head back into that space can be anywhere from a few minutes to 10. Ouch, that is a lot of wasted time.
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Set up specific times to read email and communicate to others those times so that you manage their expectations as far as your response time.
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Respond quickly that have a simple and quick response.
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Leave the rest in either your in-box or folders you have set up for later When you have time to “do the work” to respond.
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Delete when you are done, or file it away. In other words, clean up your in-box often.
