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7 Tips to Help You Get You Out of Your Inbox

Get Out of Your Inbox and Get to Work

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Rather than checking your inbox for the 57th time today, check your to-do list and determine what you should be doing.

Your email is distractions and other people’s priorities. Your to-do list is your list of prioritized tasks.

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9 Email Productivity Secrets That Will Get Your Life Back

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forbes.com

Does it sometimes feel like email is taking over your life? Considering that reading and responding to email accounts for about 28% of our total workweek, this isn't much of an exaggeration. The good news is that there are practical and proven ways to help reduce the time you spend dealing [...]

Key Ideas

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 immediat...

Unsubscribe

Unsubscribe from every list that doesn’t offer solid value for your business.

Turn off email notifications

Interrupting a task with notifications leads to a loss of concentration and a decline in productivity levels.

Feel free to set up an autoresponder re-directing all urgent matters to your phone.

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10 Quick Tips for Avoiding Distractions at Work

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hbr.org

Executive Summary The average employee is getting interrupted 50 to 60 times per day, and most of these interruptions are unimportant. As a result, people are spending little time in what psychologists call "the flow state", a space where we're most productive.

Key Ideas

Distraction at Work

Distraction at work has increased manifold. The reasons can be anything from shrinking office spaces, to open office culture that promotes 'visual noise' or even to push-notifications and instant m...

Minimize your follow-ups

Most of our email is replied on the spot and has incomplete information, which leads to a lot of back and forth dialogue.

To minimize this, reply at a suitable time when you can provide sufficient details, clear action items, due date or deadline if any, and maybe an alternative.

Mindless Scrolling

We keep checking email, instant messages in our smartphones or office PC, and even social media, whenever we get the urge or any new notification.

Allotting specific times to check your phone's messages and email, like in a two to three-hour intervals, can boost your productivity by 40%.

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This is Why the People Who Work At Your Company are So Unproductive

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medium.com

One of the most horrifying statistics for modern knowledge workers is how much time they spend on email. They send, receive, and respond to email for an average of 5.6 hour per workday. According to Cal Newport, our highest value work is rare, valuable, and cognitively demanding.

Key Ideas

Shockingly Unproductive

Studies show that employees spend more than five hours per day reading and replying to emails. While it may seem like urgent work, email is not the best kind of work.

Facilitate Deep Work

A few smart strategies that can be deployed:

Installing pods for deep work while having common areas for collaborative work.
Wearing headphones that are easily seen to signal that you are not to be disturbed.
Turning your office into a library, following the same culture of quietness where everyone is hushed and respectful.

Email is not Real Work

Real work, by definition, should be rare, valuable and cognitively demanding.

Email does not check any of these boxes, and is, therefore, a pseudo work.

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