Who's In Charge -- Email or You?

An Entrepreneur article, Time Out, struck a nerve with me. Sub-title is: Never enough time? Practice these simple time management techniques and get yourlife back in control. The first section in the article talks about email, and it starts with, "E-mail is just one time management pitfall for businesspeople: Turla [Peter Turla of the National Management Institute] estimates that 65 percent of the participants in his time management seminars compulsively check their e-mail."  Uh-huh!  Guilty as charged! 

The article has some great tips on dealing with email and other time-sinks in our lives, but the one action I took has already made a difference for me. I created an email folder called "Later", and the daily news emails that I used to pore over every morning now go in there unread. If I have time later, I go back and read them. If not -- and there have been plenty of days when I have not -- I just move on.  You see, I've been something of a "news junkie".  I have now learned I can get along just fine without so much news, and I have freed up close to a half hour each day.

You probably receive some category of email that you could drag into a Later folder. If you can't get to it later, life will go on. Buy yourself some time.  The article's other email suggestions are:

• Delegate less important e-mail to employees.
• Set up different e-mail accounts--one for vendors, one for clients and one for employees--so you can organize and prioritize. 
• If it works for you, set up an automatic reply that says you check e-mail at 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., for example, and advise people with urgent requests to call instead.
• Prioritize your e-mails in terms of urgency, so every e-mail doesn't require a quick reply. 
• Set aside 15 to 30 minutes in the evening to reply to detail-oriented e-mails. This will give you time to craft a good response instead of typing on the fly during the day.

Comments

[Mushtaq Maxwell]

Well it would help if I attached the link so here goes :) http://livinginbarbados.blogspot.com/

Not sure how to get it to link so you may have to copy and paste in your browser.

[Mushtaq Maxwell]

I came across this posting on a blog that talks about being addicted to the Blackberry. I thought it was interesting and perhaps the above tips might even apply.

[K]

Compulsive email checker myself.
Great post, I recently linked to it from my new domain (yep, I'm a big girl now).