Time Spend On Email

I’ve been tracking my time over the past few weeks and one trend I see is that I spend way to much time on email.

So I searched around on how to get a handle and I saw a few trends.

David Allen of GTD fame suggests a 4 prong approach. Delete. File what you can file. Anything you can do in just 2 minutes, just do it. If it is a longer project, get out of your email and into a system of managing your todo lists.

Tim Ferriss suggests limiting your mail checking to twice a day.

So combining these together I am now.

1. Checking my email at 7:30 when I arrive. I process my email until anything actionable is in my todo system in Airtable. Anything that I need to keep a record of goes into OneNote. I respond to whatever needs responding. I only leave emails in my inbox that I am expecting a response from that day.
2. I then close Outlook and look at my Todo system.
3. Around 12:00, while I am eating lunch I reopen Outlook and reprocess my email.

And that is sort of it. I’ll also sometimes go in at the end of the day as well.

And I am not perfect, I still sneak peeks sometime. But it does not seems to be a good strategy, so I am trying to limit it.