How much time do you spend during your working day handling email?

This single task has become one of the biggest time wasters as emails flood in all day long demanding our attention, yet often being trivial.

For too many people, and I’ve been one, it becomes a constant interruption tool, preventing us from working effectively.

Your time is precious and too many people reach the end of the day exhausted and dismayed that they didn’t achieve everything on their to-do list after all.

The first rule is to turn off email notification, or if you can’t, keep your email program shut. Most people can’t resist stopping their thought train to look at that new email, but in a busy day this is the worst thing you can do. Sure your customer might appreciate a fast reply, but actually you are training them to interrupt you more often!

The second rule is never to check your email first thing of a morning. This is probably one of the hardest rules, but you should aim to complete your highest priority tasks by 11am every day and if you start by checking emails you are likely to miss this deadline. Can you imagine having a major task completed before lunch every working day? How would this impact on how you feel about your job or business?

Set aside a maximum of half an hour to check your emails in the middle of the day and if you must, check them again in your last half hour of the working day.

You can even set an automated reply letting people know you won’t deal with your email until the end of the day. This sounds harsh at first, but it stops them phoning you to ask why you haven’t responded as fast as you used to and interrupting you anyway.

People  tend to handle and forgive anything if you explain it to them.