Delay your responses

Only respond to yesterday’s emails -- unless they’re urgent. 

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IDEA EXTRACTED FROM:

Email Killing Your Productivity? Here Are 9 Ways to Fight Back.

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Email Killing Your Productivity? Here Are 9 Ways to Fight Back.

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  • Take action immediately

    browse the inbox for emails that can be immediately deleted (spam or promotional emails). Then select messages that don’t require a response and delete or archive them.  Don’t let important emails sit in your inbox for days . Unless you’re on vacation, respond within 48 hours. Reply to the sender as soon as you’ve read his or her message. If you’re unable to respond immediately, communicate to the sender that you received the message and will be in touch shortly. Set a deadline and follow up.

    4 Tips to Better Manage Your Email Inbox

  • Important vs. urgent tasks

    Important tasks are things that contribute to your long-term mission, values, and goals. Urgent tasks are tasks that have to be dealt with immediately: phone calls, urgent deadlines, and situations where you have to respond quickly. Sometimes important tasks stare you right in the face, but you neglect them and respond to urgent but unimportant things.

    The secret to mastering your time is to systematically focus on importance and suppress urgency

  • Organize your emails

    Create the following 2 folders: Require Action besides simply responding. Require Response.  File emails here that you are unable to respond to immediately. All other emails, once read, should go directly to their appropriate permanent files using rules.

    9 Email Productivity Secrets That Will Get Your Life Back

  • Constrains and productivity

    If you have lots to do and the entire week for that, it doesn’t feel that urgent, and you often do little things (answering emails). But if you only have an hour a day, and one really important project, you’d be way more focused. 

    Haiku Productivity: The Power of Limits to Increase Our Focus