How Many Days Can You Go Without Checking Email or Social Media?

Several weeks ago I decided to try a simple experiment. I opted to check email and social media accounts only three times in a week. I wanted to see what effect this less frequent, non-daily checking would have on my productivity and social connections.

Many years ago when the web was a lot smaller and email was less popular, this would have been no big deal. In the mid 1990s I could get away with checking email a few times a week, even in business. People often didn’t expect a fast turnaround via email. If they needed a fast response, they’d use the phone.

Today it’s become common, especially in the world of small business, to check email and/or social media several times per day at least. In some situations this seems justifiable. More frequent checking means faster turnaround for clients. Speed is classy, especially for customer service. Faster response times can give a business a competitive advantage.

But this frequent checking doesn’t come for free. If you’re the one doing all of this checking, some of the drawbacks include:

reduced ability to focusbecoming urgency driven and losing sight of what’s importantdealing with frequent distractionsconstantly having the thoughts of others floating through your mindbecoming addicted and checking excessively, often without conscious thoughtreduced productivitydiminished in-person social lifelosing the ability to properly prioritize messagesspending much more time on messages than is reasonableweakening the connection to your own personal goalswasting time that’s better spent elsewhere

Here are some of the key benefits I experienced with less frequent checking of online accounts:

I found it much easier to maintain focus on my own goals and projectsI got more done, having some of my most productive weeks in yearsI enjoyed a greater sense of time abundance, like I had more space in each day to work, live, and playI lost the desire to post status updates just for the sake of posting somethingI experienced a significant drop in how important email and social media felt to me; they receded into the background of my lifeI spent less time thinking about email and social media each dayI went to bed at a more consistent time (no late night communication) and had an easy time getting up at 5am seven days a weekI posted fewer status updates and answered fewer emails and private messagesI received significantly fewer replies and comments (I gave people much less to reply to, so less for me to read)I found it easier to prioritize messages intelligently by seeing them in the context of a few days’ worth of messagesI saved several hours per week that I was able to spend on more rewarding and productive tasksI exercised more frequently (5-7 days per week)I felt more relaxed and less stressed but also more motivatedI completed some projects with nary a status update about them (does anyone care that I had a new water heater installed this month?)The mental and emotional itch to do frequent checks at random times has faded significantlyI became less aware of what my online “friends” were doing but more aware of what I was doing as well as the people closest to meI enjoyed the time I spent with my kids more and felt more engaged with them

Here are the negative consequences I experienced:

I missed a timely email invite to play disc golf (my regular group plays on Saturdays, but this was an extra invite for a game on Sunday)

Seriously that’s the only negative consequence that comes to mind — not exactly an apocalypse.

There have been some adaptations to make as well, but I wouldn’t call them negative consequences. If someone wants to schedule a phone or Skype call with me or an in-person meet-up, I just have to schedule it further in advance to allow enough time for the back-and-forth messages to agree to a time.

I may miss out on some time-sensitive invitations. Those “Hey, guess what! I’m in Vegas tonight. Let’s meet up!” messages may go unseen until the window has passed. But that isn’t a huge deal relative to all the benefits.

I found that the best time of day for me to handle email and social media is in the evening. I found that when I checked it early in the day, it was too tempting to feel curious about it again a few hours later. But when I checked around 5-8pm, that worked very well. First, this keeps my daytimes free to focus on other items. Second, there’s no incentive to spend excessive time on messages as a way of procrastinating because by then I’ve already done my work for the day if it’s a workday. Third, I feel more relaxed when answering personal messages since it’s not going to push back any of my daytime activities; it might simply mean eating dinner a little later.

I think my favorite pattern is to check email on Sundays, Thursdays, and Fridays. This gives me a solid four-day (96-hour) block to get some real work done at the start of each week since I can go through Mon, Tue, Wed, and Thu without doing email or social media till Thursday evening.

What if someone emails me on Monday and doesn’t get a reply till Thursday evening? My business isn’t so urgency driven that this would likely be a problem. The people who may need to get in touch with me more urgently can call or text me. I told such people about this experiment when it began, so they know what to expect. This is working out just fine so far. In fact, some people have been curious about it and are reconsidering their own online habits as a result.

At first that stretch of going for four days without checking email seemed a bit much, but now I really like it. It’s so nice to feel that I have this abundance of offline time to get my work done and live my life without worrying about what’s happening in my online communication circles. I always know I can catch up on it later.

Checking email and social media three times a week is becoming a new default pattern for me. I think I’ve done this long enough now (this is week four) that I can maintain it with relative ease. My goal here was to break the pattern of unnecessarily excessive checking and replace it with something more productive and sensible, not to replace it with something impractically rigid. If I feel it’s warranted due to particular circumstances, I can always add an extra check. For instance, when I post a new blog article, it makes sense to share a status update to let people know about it; in some cases I can do that without actually visiting the site.

Suppose you sign up for a new online service and need to click a verification link in an email, which means you have to bring up your email to do this. Do you give yourself permission to check email just to click that verification link and not handle anything else? Do you click the link and process whatever email is there too? Or do you just decide it’s best to finish the opt-in process during your next scheduled email check?

These kinds of decisions can be made on a case by case basis initially, and then if you notice any patterns happening there, you can come up with a more general and consistent way of handling them. A stray check now or then won’t hurt your productivity once your new patterns are well established. However, a stray check can definitely hurt your ability to get the new pattern conditioned during those vulnerable first 2-3 weeks.

Here’s a summary of the key lessons I learned from this experiment:

Processing online communication more frequently makes it seem more important with respect to your other goals, projects, and desires, and this can lead to an unbalanced prioritization of how you spend your time, not to mention addictive behavior. And conversely, checking less frequently makes such communication appear much less significant and can also break a prior addiction.The more often you reply to messages or post status updates, the more replies and comments you’ll receive, which means more reading and potentially more replying (and then more replies to your replies, and so on). The less often you check messages or post status updates, the fewer responses you’ll receive, which means less reading and less replying for you; this can save you hours per week.If sound time management practices are important to you, it’s wise to rationally decide in advance when and how often you actually need to check messages. Then stick to your schedule. If you find yourself triggered to check in more frequently, it’s likely that the old habits are still too strongly ingrained, so you’re going to need to weaken those neural pathways first by checking in significantly less often for a while (4x per week or less). Otherwise you’re going to waste a lot of mental energy exerting your willpower NOT to check in so often.

Keep in mind that good habits run on autopilot and do not require serious willpower to maintain. Neurologically speaking, self-discipline is a limited resource. If you have to exercise your self-discipline every day to get yourself not to do what you’re tempted to do, you’re burning up this resource unnecessarily, and then it won’t be available for other areas where you need it. Your brain can only handle so much self-discipline (and its limits are normally quite low), so use your discipline to establish sensible habits that can be self-maintaining after the first 2-3 weeks. Sometimes this requires distancing yourself from the old habits for a few weeks to give them a chance to fade.

Checking email three times per week feels about right for me, and the short-term results have been promising to say the least, so for now I intend to continue with this. Twice a week could work too (probably Thursday and Sunday), and I may test that in December. I might even drop it down to once a week, but that would mean longer delays for certain things, like scheduling phone calls, so I think 2-3x per week would be about the right balance.

What about checking on your cell phone while you’re out, such as in those spaces of extra time while waiting in line? I found this to be a bad idea in general. While it seems efficient at first glance, it also strengthens some bad mental habits, like constantly thinking about what’s going on online, and potentially reinforcing a distracting addiction. I find it more sensible to read a few extra pages of an ebook or to simply think about some of my own goals or upcoming decisions to make.

I’ve shared what’s working for me based on my personal testing. Your situation may be different of course. The point of sharing this is to stir up your experimental side to discover what works best for you, especially if you feel you’ve been checking in way too often.

How often you check in is completely your choice. Even if you have a job that “requires” frequent checking, you chose that job, and you’re free to quit if the job is conditioning bad habits. If you think frequent checking is expected of you at work, you can renegotiate those expectations and encourage people to use other communication channels for truly urgent messages. Or you can set up one email account for urgent communication that you check often, and use another account for non-urgent messages that you check less often.

If you’re currently in a pattern of checking email multiple times per day, I’d encourage you to test a non-daily schedule to see what it’s like. Try going every other day (and just once on those days, preferably in the evening) to see what it’s like. It may be tough at first, but you’ll get used to it. If you do that, it’s going to rewire your thinking and allow some of your other goals to rise in priority.

This type of experiment is also a good use of a 30-day trial.

When was the last time you went 72 hours (3 days) without checking any email or social media? If you suspect it’s been a year or more, or only due to extreme circumstances like an illness, then I challenge you to attempt this. Make email wait for your goals. Don’t make your goals wait for you to finish your email.

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Easy access to email and calendar, Google Notifier

Google Notifier is a simple utility that does 2 things.

It notifies you as email comes in, or as appointments are nigh (that’s right nigh….)

It also gives you instant access to compose an email, or create an event, without going through a web browser.

It is simple, elegant, and for Google users, it is a perfect add on!

Here are 7 ways to use Google Calendar to better schedule your life: 7 Google Calendar Planning Tips

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Two Tips for Gmail Users to Manage Email More Efficiently

A lot has been written on how batch processing is the most efficient way to manage email. If you’re unfamiliar with the practice within this context, it more or less advocates only checking and processing your email a few times a day. By limiting task-switching, you’re able to achieve better focus and get more done.

Even though we may be cognizant of this, only checking and processing your email a few times a day is not easy to do for a whole slew of reasons: The best way to overcome any challenge is to create an environment where it’s easy to succeed. For managing your email efficiently, creating an environment that reduces your temptation to frequently check email encourages practicing batch processing.

Here are two simple ways that Gmail users can design an environment that’s more conducive to batch processing and subsequently manage email more efficiently:

For many of us, Gmail is more than just a mail client; it’s where we chat with co-workers, store important documents,  and access our calendars. It’s literally the central hub for productivity.

In its current state, the gateway to most of these ancillary Google services is on the top pane of your inbox, so the process for retrieving your documents requires first heading to your inbox. If there are new messages dangling in front of you every time you want to open a document, resisting the temptation to check your email can be very difficult.

A simple trick to circumvent this is to bookmark each ancillary service so that you can access it without checking your email. Google Docs, Calendar, and Reader are great ones to begin with, but you can even go as far as bookmarking the Compose function so that new messages can be initiated without entering your inbox.

 

Most browsers enable you to append bookmarks on the toolbar, which essentially replicates the top pane access available in the Gmail client. If you access a particular document frequently, you can even save a step by adding a direct bookmark to that doc in your browser.

Again, batch processing is easier to execute when you limit the temptation of checking your email frequently. Inbox pause is an amazing free plugin from Baydin that does exactly that.

In short, Inbox Pause allows you to control when messages appear, so “pausing” your inbox prevents new messages from showing up until you dictate that you’re ready for them to appear. From the moment you click pause, you could receive 100 emails, but they’ll be kept in purgatory until you “un-pause” your inbox via a simple button.

 

Say your goal is to process email 3 times a day (i.e. 10 am, 2 pm and 6 pm). By pausing your inbox after processing at the designated time slots, you can maintain a clean inbox until the next time you’re ready to check it. Not only does this make batch processing easier, but the mere fact that no new messages await diminishes the temptation to constantly check your email. After all, there’s nothing new in your inbox across any device until you click un-pause.

If you’re truly making an effort to commit to batch processing, inbox pause allows you to shift the paradigm of email—without it, you’re at the mercy of other people. And though you still have to refrain from continually un-pausing your inbox for it be effective, the fact that you need to opt-in against your intentions through one more additional action (clicking un-pause), serves as another line of defense in the struggle to maintain discipline.

These two practices are both excellent ways to create an enviroment that promotes effective batch processing.

What practices do you use to manage email efficiently?

Scott Britton is a startup enthusiast and writer based in New York City. He's currently a business development and marketing executive for SinglePlatform and writes about business development, productivity, and personal development at Life-LongLearner.com. You can find him on twitter at @ScottBrit

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Goodbye, Sparrow! 8 Alternatives to Sparrow for Email

So, you were looking for a great alternative to Apple’s Mail.app on OS X and iOS and stumbled upon Sparrow. It was fast, handled mail in a comfortable and familiar Gmail fashion, and was full featured. It was all good until you heard that there will be no more new features coming to it because of Google buying out the company. And, if the past is any indication (it is), Sparrow will eventually be discontinued. So, rather than sink with the ship, try one of these 8 Sparrow alternatives to ensure that your email client is covered into the future.

It seems counterintuitive to recommend Sparrow to get away from Mail.app and then Mail.app to get away from Sparrow, but Mail.app has proven to be quite the workhorse. With all of the updates that came with Lion last year, Mail.app is definitely a great Mail client to use.

Also, because of Mail.app’s integration with OS X and iOS, it’s one of the only ways that you can do fun things like email to OmniFocus inbox or setup some serious rules and filters.

iCloud Mail is getting better too, but it’s a very minimal version of the desktop client and can only be used with an iCloud email account; so, that’s not very useful for people that use other email accounts and need more robust features that the desktop client offers

Postbox (Windows and OS X)

Postbox has been around for a number of years now and the creators consider it to be the best desktop Gmail client for Mac and Windows. Now with Sparrow “gone”, I’d probably have to agree. Postbox is a full featured email client that supports IMAP and POP accounts as well as Exchange (for all of us corporate types out there). Another added nicety is that Postbox supports OmniFocus and Evernote integration. Good stuff.

Postbox’s UI feels great in OS X and gives the user a vast set of features like Gmail integration, multiple account support, social network photos for your contacts, a threaded message view and more. Oh, and Postbox is only $9.95.

If you are solely a Gmail user and love the Gmail experience, then Mailplane may be the app for you. Mailplane is basically a UI wrapper around the Gmail client for OS X. Mailplane adds a lot of niceties to the web experience of Gmail like being able to get Growl notifications or even link documents on your Mac to an email. You can also have unlimited Gmail accounts in Mailplane.

Mailplane is a tad expensive ($24.95), especially considering the more feature rich Postbox is less than half that, but if you are a Gmail UI nerd, then Mailplane may work for you.

When Sparrow for iPhone came out it instantly replaced Mail.app (as much as you can replace Mail.app) on my iPhone, but before that I was using Emailganizer. The only two things I can’t stand about Emailganizer is its shoddy name and its shoddy design and UI. Other than that, Emailganizer is a super powerful app that has some great features like recognition of “context folders” (@action, @waiting, etc.), support for basically any email provider or account type you can think of, add emails as tasks to Exchange, Toodledo, OmniFocus, Things, etc., attach emails to the iOS Calendar, and more.

Emailganizer is a robust email client for your iPhone. Too bad there isn’t an iPad version yet!

No matter what anyone says, Outlook is a pretty great email application and if you are in a medium to large company it’s pretty much standard issue email software. With the newer versions of Outlook you get threaded message views, built in calendar and tasks, extremely intelligent filters and auto responders, searching and filtering on any item and field you could imagine as well as support for any type of email account.

It isn’t cheap ($119), but Outlook for Mac is a great email tool that can definitely replace Sparrow on your Mac.

While we can’t say that Notify is a full bore email client, it does a great job of notifying you of and allowing you to preview emails and with its pro features allows you to delete, file them, or respond to them as well. Notify is more of a small app that notifies you of important emails that so you can handle them immediately, which is better than being notified of every email and being interrupted while you are working.

MailMate for Mac is a full featured IMAP email client. It supports multiple accounts and is highly “keyboard centric”, meaning that the entire app can be driven with keyboard shortcuts. There are also some great unique features like Markdown support in the email compose box as well as “Smart Mailboxes” that allow you to create smart filters and base other smart mailboxes on previous smart mailboxes. The search in MailMate is top notch as well; it’s fast and accurate.

MailMate is $29.99 but you can pick up a free trial to see if it’s a good alternative for you.

If you can stay with Sparrow just a little longer (like till the end of Summer?), then you can give Mail Pilot a spin. Mail Pilot got a lot of great press for being the company to “reimagine email”. But, more than marketing fluff, it looks like Mail Pilot might actually do it. Basically, Mail Pilot turns your email into a todo list and lets you mark items as done or even gives you some advanced controls to review them later. Mail Pilot will support all major email services, give you a single login, and even a cool smart “Autopilot” feature that lets you mark specific emails for review at a certain time (like all newsletters for a certain day of the week).

CM Smith is a technologist, writer, and husband. He holds a degree in MIS and CMPSC from Penn State. CM is also interested in personal productivity, creativity and how to use technology to get things done. Check out his writing at devburner.net or follow him on Twitter.

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How to Use Gmail Search to Clean up Your Email Archive

I am not a fan of deleting emails from my Gmail.

The reason is simple: I love Gmail search and I often use it to find past conversations and bring up old contacts. I receive and read my email using Thunderbird, but I use the Gmail web interface to find all the past correspondence (which can be accessed from any computer — provided I remember my login details).

However, in some cases there’s absolutely no point in saving some of your emails — you’ll never get back to them. So why clutter your email archive?

In case you don’t know how to delete all emails filtered by your search, here’s a quick how-to:

Select “All”Then click “Select all XXXX conversations in Search results“Delete

Search: [from:noreply* OR from:do-not-reply* OR from:donotreply* OR from:notification*]

This way you’ll filter out all the automated updates that come from bots (such as social media friend requests (noreply-xxx@plus.google.com), calendar reminders (noreply@zohocalendar.com), etc.). Chances are, you’ll need those updates only once in a lifetime.

Bonus Tip: Don’t create a filter to delete those emails, as this will delete all the future updates as well. Instead, create a calendar reminder to do the regular clean up at least quarterly.

Search: [from:wordpress* OR from:disqus]

If you are a blogger who hasn’t disabled comments, you’re probably getting email notifications each time a comment is pending approval or waiting for your reply. While these are probably useful for a “one-time notification”, there’s no reason to keep them in your inbox/archive.

Search option one: [unsubscribe]

Search option two: [from:news* OR from:digest* OR from:auto* OR from:reports* OR from:*mailer*]

Not all emails here are likely to be worth deleting (I usually refer back to my most important email subscriptions if I forget a link or need a citation for a blog post, for example). But this search is a great starting point. Now you can go through search results and check any email you don’t think you need to keep. Simply click on “Filter messages like this” and create a filter to delete all of them.

You can also unsubscribe while you are there to prevent future emails. I mean, it’s a good thing to clean up your email subscriptions as well while you are there…right?

Bonus Tip: And there’s an app for that! Unroll.me is a great online tool that lets you sign in (using Gmail authentication) and then scans your email inbox for possible subscriptions. You can unsubscribe from any of the emails right from within the tool interface:

Like I said, I love my Gmail inbox for archiving all of my correspondence for me and keeping it in “the cloud”. No matter how often I move from computer to computer or change email clients, I can always rest assured that my email archive is intact.

As a result, I don’t like deleting too much of my email — especially the following types:

Personal correspondence with my contacts (obviously);Invoices and payment confirmations;Brand-name tracking updates (from Google Alerts, for example). These could be turned into the great source of brand-growth analysis. Besides, they can be used to later bring up your brand promoters.

To make sure I never accidentally delete important emails when doing regular clean up, I create a “Always mark it as important” filter.

Do you have any tips for cleaning up your email inbox? Please let me know in the comments!

Ann Smarty is the productivity freak and self-funded entrepreneur running MyBlogGuest.com, the free community of guest bloggers who preach high-quality approach to guest blogging.

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The Most Successful E-mail I Ever Wrote

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Lifehack Deals: Keep Your Email Sanity with SaneBox

As we kick off another weekend, I’m sure you’re not thinking about all of the email you have to deal with when you return to work. I’m not just talking about the email that you left behind for follow-up; I’m also talking about all of the email you’ll receive over the weekend. After all, the Internet never sleeps.

Knowing all of this, can your mind truly be on the weekend at hand? Furthermore, can you keep your mind on the important stuff that goes on outside of your email inbox knowing that you’re going to have to deal with both the important and unimportant messages that will arrive in your inbox on a non-stop basis?

It’s kind of insane, isn’t it?

This is where the latest Lifehack Deals offer comes to the rescue…with SaneBox.

What is SaneBox?

SaneBox contains algorithms to determine the importance of each email that finds its way into your inbox, move unimportant messages out of your inbox into a separate folder, and then summarize them in a daily digest. I’d like to think of it as Gmail’s Priority Inbox on steroids – but it works for all kinds of email platforms. Because of this algorithm, SaneBox separates your most important emails from the ones that can wait. This allows you to prioritize the way you read your messages, saving you time and frustration.

SaneBox works with any mail client you use, such as:

GmailYahoo MailMicrosoft OutlookApple MailMozilla ThunderbirdAOL…and more

Lifehack Deals has worked out a sweet deal with SaneBox. Just sign up to enjoy a free month trial to test out SaneBox, and receive a $14.85 credit towards an annual SaneBox subscription if you decide it’s making you more efficient and effective with not only your inbox – but with your time as a whole. If it works out for you, the savings work out to three additional months of SaneBox…for free!

One of the key features of SaneBox is its ease of use – and adoption.

It doesn’t require any training. There are no plug-ins or downloads, and it works on any email client and service. Simply put: if you know how to use email folders, then you know how to use Sanebox. You manage your email like you normally would. SaneBox keeps all important emails in your Inbox and automatically sends all unimportant ones to the SaneLater folder. You can easily check them at your leisure, and you are also sent a daily SaneLater digest…so you never have to leave your inbox.

Some of SaneBox’s other features include:

Blackhole Unsubscribe: One-click-unsubscribe from people you hate getting emails fromOne-Click Defer Power: Defer non-urgent emails until laterSpam Folder Monitoring: It watches your spam folder for false positives, and fishes out emails caught there by mistakeFollowup with RemindMe: Reminders when an email you sent was unansweredSocial Network Refinement: Make your inbox is smarter by connecting to your social platforms…and much more

So sign up for this latest Lifehack Deals offer today and get started bringing sanity back into your email management with SaneBox. Just click on the “free” button on our Lifehack Deals page and you’ll be sent straight to SaneBox’s registration process. Once you finish there you will have one free month of use and if you decide you like it (which you will) you’ll have a $14.85 credit. If you decide to purchase an annual membership, it will cost you only $40 which is 33% off the price of an annual membership!

Now go and enjoy weekends going forward without concerning yourself about your inbox. SaneBox – and Lifehack Deals – have got you covered.

Mike Vardy is a writer, speaker, and "productivityist". You can read more of his writing and learn more about him at Vardy.me, and he can be found on Twitter as @mikevardy.

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Five Simple Yet Effective Tips for Managing Your Email

Everyone nowadays gets way too many emails and spends too much time dealing with them. If you feel like you are wasting too much time on email, you need re-evaluate how you manage it. Here are five simple tips to help you regain control over your inbox so you can do more important (and fun) things.

Nobody likes to read long emails. As more people are checking their emails on their phones and tablets, you need to be succinct with what you write.

Try to keep it brief by using no more than six sentences. This will force you to get to the point. If you need more sentences – consider calling the person or having a face-to-face meeting to communicate your thoughts.

Don’t be a slave to your inbox. If you are, someone else has power of how effective your days are and that’s a recipe for disaster. The issue with people treating their inbox as their to-do list is that external people have direct control on how you go through your day and what your workload will be. Instead, you should be the one in control.

Here is an easy way to get started with this: don’t check your email first thing in the morning. Make it the second thing – after you have done your most important task.

This first simple step allows to take back control over your day. Even if email is very important to you, give this a try. If that means post-posing checking your email by half an hour – do it. That is plenty of time to do one important task.

Email is not the best medium for urgent matters – that’s where phone calls excel. However, email is great for correspondence where you don’t require an immediate response.

That’s why you want to make it a habit to not always respond to emails immediately. The idea is that you do not want to condition others that email is an effective medium for urgent matters. If the other person notices that you always respond to email within ten minutes, that person will start to assume he or she can email you for urgent matters.

No.

You want to avoid that as much as possible. Be upfront with people when you communicate a lot via email. I always tell others that they will get a response from me within two business days. If they need to reach me for something urgent, they can call or text me. Otherwise, I prefer to receive emails.

If you constantly checking your email and you process your email as they come in, you are wasting a lot of time. Instead, you should check your email in batches. Batching tasks is an effective way of processing and getting things done that are similar in nature. That’s why you should do this as well as part of how you manage your emails. Here is a simple tip to do that:

Check emails at fixed times and spend no more than half an hour each time.

I like to call this concept “email hotspots” – the times of the day when you process your email in batches. This requires you to turn off your email program and to learn that it is okay to process emails at fixed times each day.

This guidelines is flexible depending on how many emails you get. If you get less than thirty emails a day, checking your email twice in a day should be good enough. In a typical 9-to-5 day, 10am (you have an hour to do one task before checking your email) and 3pm are great times to do this.

The touch it once principle says that each item should only be handled once. This is especially the case for emails. Have you ever read an email, thought about replying back, postponed it and you had to reread the email again to understand what it was about? It happens to the best of us.

Doing this for one email is fine. What if you have to do this with twenty emails? You will be wasting a lot of time. It’s more effective to deal with emails as you read them for the first time. Don’t let emails linger around “for later”. Touch it once. Read and decide what to do right away with it. If it takes less than two minutes to respond, do it right away.

If you have to respond but for some reason you can’t – put the email in the drafts folder. This folder will have all the emails you’ve started to reply to, but have not sent yet. As you come back to it, you know where to find your email and you can promptly respond.

(Photo credit: Businessman Working on Email via Shutterstock)

+Thanh Pham is an obsessed productivity geek, systems thinker, blogger, avid reader and a world traveler. He specializes in time management for organizations and personal productivity for executives. Read more about him over at Asian Efficiency.

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AwayFind Makes Your Email Management Even More Productive with New Features

We’ve mentioned AwayFind here before at Lifehack, which is one of the best tools you can use to “lifehack” your email. Today the service amped up its lifehacking skills with the arrival of AwayFind Recommendations — and they’ve also unveiled a way for you have the best of the service…for free.

For those of you unfamiliar with AwayFind, here’s what the service does for you and your ever-expanding email inbox:

AwayFind is a web application that finds and delivers timely email messages. When a timely message arrives in your inbox, AwayFind will send an SMS, “push” notify you on your iPhone/Android, or even call, IM, or DM (Twitter). You can also use AwayFind to route messages to your co-workers.

With the latest addition to the AwayFind service, users have a recommendation engine in their toolbox that bases priorities on both history and current response rate. Essentially, you can filter through all of your emails and discover who matters to you most — and you can do it right away.

Why is this so critical to productivity and email management? Considering that the most frequent people you correspond with amounts to less than 2% of the emails you receive, it’s counter-productive to have that small percentage keep you on “inbox alert” all day long. AwayFind Recommendations frees you even further from your inbox with just one click.

In the image below, you’ll see that an “Add” button appears next to those who you commonly receive emails from. Just click on that button and you’ll get an alert via text or our app when that person emails you. Because AwayFind is able to tell you just how frequent — and how recent — these people have emailed you. Figuring who to pay attention to immediately has never been easier.

Additionally, at any point you can change your list with AwayFind’s iPhone & Android apps or Chrome/Firefox & Google Apps extensions. The recommendation engine will also send you updated recommendations when those who are important to you has changed, generally every few weeks or months.

Secondly, AwayFind has now implemented a feature that lets you level up the service even if you’re not at a point where you can upgrade to one of their premium plans.

Now when you invite your important contacts (like those recommended through AwayFind Recommendations, for example) and if they sign up for AwayFind you receive instant, unlimited alerts between each other. Even better, when they sign up, your contacts get unlimited alerts from you as well, allowing you to help them become more productive with their email. It’s a real win-win.

AwayFind has helped numerous people get through their day without being tied to their email — in fact, I’m one of them. Being able to get an important email from my wife or from a client without having to sift through my inbox or check email more than twice per day has been something that has not only improved my productivity, but has helped me get the important work done. With these latest features, AwayFind gives you even more reasons to give the service a try to see if it can do the same for you.

AwayFind has powered up my productivity well beyond the inbox. Why not let it do the same for you?

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Handling Urgency at Work Without Email

Catch the moment by sunnyUK on flickr

Just the other day, a co-worker was called out by another co-worker that they “weren’t answering their email quickly enough.” This comment was made even when our company employs a host of ways to contact each other immediately.

The issue that was being discussed was urgent and had to be handled that day, but the accusing party in no way handled the work as being urgent. For some reason they expected an immediate response via email, even though email is not an “immediate response” type of tool. And frankly, it should never be considered to be one especially with the types of technology we have at our disposal.

The way that I and many others treat email is as a piece of mail. We don’t sit in front of our mailbox all day, waiting for something to be put into it, only to take it out, create a reply, put it in an envelope, stamp, and send it off. That would be ridiculous, right? So, why should we be expected to deal with email this way?

The problem is that most people treat email this way.

It wasn’t until I was introduced to the GTD ecosystem that I found thoughts on email like that of Merlin Mann or even Leo Babauta. These guys saw email as mail, something that piles up throughout our day and then we process it. We then make decisions on what we are supposed to do next with this incoming mail; respond to it, make it a piece of reference material, trash it, etc. Once I was able to understand this way of thinking, email wasn’t an immediate response type of tool anymore. This kept me out of my inbox and allowed me to get more done as well as handle urgent issues the right way.

I hear this a lot where I work:

“It’s my job to respond to email.”

What a sad state of affairs; a professional email responder. Actually, I would say that most anyone that says that truly means that their job is to handle immediate issues in their business; it just so happens that many people still treat email as an immediate response type of communication.

I know that we productivity nerds can’t move the immovable force of overuse of email, but we can bring some options to the table that those afflicted with immediate email action can try to employ.

Here are a few ways that you can help yourself and possibly others in your company deal with urgent matters without the use of a sea of email. These may seem dead obvious, but you will be extremely surprised at how little they are used for urgent issues:

No matter what anyone says, IM isn’t just a way to chat with your friends at work (although that can be an added benefit). IM stands for instant messaging and that is exactly what it should be used for; getting a hold of someone instantly.

If you company doesn’t use IM, especially in a company where issues with customers are of utmost important, you may want to try to talk your higher-ups and put it in place. IM at work has saved a ton of time and many email messages being overlooked.

A telephone? What the hell is that? It’s that thing that is dusty, sits on the corner of your desk, and is used maybe once a day. The fact is that the phone is the best tool for getting things done quickly across far reaches.

Yes, maybe you can type 160 words per minute, but you can’t explain problems over IM or email like you can verbally. If something is super important and needs done ASAP, the phone and the next medium are the best tools to use.

If you are across the office and you need something done now then go and see the person that needs to get that something done. You may want to call or IM them first to make sure that they are available, but if the issue is urgent enough, then it’s totally fine to just go and see them. Once again, speaking to someone verbally is the best way to handle urgent situations.

One of the hardest things you have to do to get out of the “living in your email inbox mentality”, especially for large corporations, is try to change your coworkers’ view on how to handle urgent issues. The best way to start is to tell them that you only check email a certain number of times a day (just like Mr. Vardy with his 3 times a day rule) and if they need something immediate, then either they can IM you, call, or stop over.

You may run into an issue that really isn’t urgent and your coworker thinks it is, but usually if you lay out some groundwork that email isn’t the best way to get something done quickly, they will respect your avenue for getting urgent things done.

If you work with a bunch of humans, how do you guys handle urgent matters?

Chris is a developer, writer, tech enthusiast, and husband. He holds a degree in MIS and CMPSC from Penn State Behrend. Chris is also interested in personal productivity and creativity and how to utilize technology to get more things done. Check out his writing about software development, productivity, and technology at devburner.net.

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5 Ways to Get Faster Email Responses

After putting together a course on How To Email Important People and speaking with nearly 200 individuals about their email habits, I’ve noticed a few common problems that people have with email.

The number one complaint is that people don’t get responses to the emails they send out.

Here is an sampling of the statements I heard:

“I can’t tell if my emails are being read or not. I hate it when people don’t respond.”

“I don’t know when or if my emails are being read. Sometimes I feel like I’m spitting words into an electronic abyss.”

“I can’t guarantee people are just throwing my emails away, but if they are reading them, they certainly aren’t responding.”

Well, I don’t have all the answers, but I do have a few suggestions. Here are five ways to get faster responses through email.

People love to procrastinate. And anytime a long email hits our inbox, that’s another excuse to procrastinate.

It’s hard to send a fast response to a long email because it requires time to read, time to digest, and time to respond. Moreover, most long emails include multiple questions or topics, which can make it tough for the reader to determine what is important within the message. This confusion often leads to more procrastination.

On the flip side, it’s quite easy to send a short reply to a short email. It doesn’t matter what you’re talking about, a shorter email will always receive a faster response.

If you want faster responses, then make it easy on the reader to respond. Ask them one question, talk about a single topic, and keep it short.

If you send people emails all the time, then they get used to seeing a message from you in their inbox. There is no sense of urgency associated with your message because they know that if they don’t reply… well, you’ll be sending another email soon.

Don’t take advantage of the fact that you can email anyone at anytime. Teach people to value your emails by only sending one when you have something valuable and important to say.

It sounds simple, but many times we forget to do so.

We clearly explain the situation in our email — maybe we even provide a few action steps — but we often forget to clearly ask for a response.

As the writer of the email, the next step always seems clear to us. For the recipient, however, it might not be so obvious. In the middle of a busy day — and we’re all busy — we need to be told what to do rather than guess at it. Make the next step clear for the reader by kindly asking for the action you want.

Another reason for delayed responses is a lack of urgency.

As a society we have adopted a method of using deadlines to make up for our tendency to procrastinate. As a result, we often decide which tasks we are going to perform based on when certain projects are due.

When it comes to email, this means that you need to state a clear deadline or risk waiting for a response until the recipient has “free time” — which is rarely.

When you write your next email, try including a deadline in the first one or two sentences of the message.

For example,

“Hi Mark,

Below is the TPS report for this Friday’s meeting — I would love to have your thoughts by Wednesday at 1pm. …”

We’re conditioned to use deadlines. If you make it clear when you need a response by, then it’s much more likely that you’ll get the response by that date.

If at all possible, never send an email to more than one person at a time. Even if it takes a few extra minutes to email everyone individually, you’ll find much better responses because of it.

The reason for this is that people push responsibility off of their own shoulders and onto the group whenever possible.If you send a message to five people, then each person always assumes that the other four will do whatever tasks are outlined in the message. The result, of course, is that nothing gets done.

If you have to message a group of people all at once, then do your best to assign tasks to specific people in the message. Otherwise, you’ll be waiting for a mystery man to step up and take action.

James Clear is the founder of Passive Panda.com, a site for people that want to earn more money. Join Passive Panda's Free Newsletter on Earning More for proven tips and strategies.

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The Email Charter: an idea worth spreading

Can anything be done to ease the stress of our ever-growing email in-boxes? TED’s Curator Chris Anderson has been thinking about the problem and today is launching an Email Charter to try to reverse the upward spiral.

The Charter has 10 rules that tackle the core reason behind email’s relentless growth — that email takes more time to process than to create. Email stress is clearly widespread. An earlier draft of the Charter attracted 50,000 views and hundreds of comments and tweets, which have helped shape the final version.

Chris sees the Charter as an idea worth spreading. “This is a problem that can’t be solved by individuals acting alone,” he said. “Email stress comes from all the unanswered emails in your inbox, and the fear that you may be causing offense or frustration to your friends and colleagues. If we can mutually agree some different ground rules, that stress can go away.”

The Charter calls on email senders to focus on respecting the time of their recipients and make emails as easy as possible to process. It also suggests we cut each other some slack, and just mutually agree it’s OK for responses to be ultra-short or delayed.

Check out the Charter here, and then join the TED conversation that Chris started here.

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How Many Times A Day Should You Check Your Email?

In my last post, I talked about six of the most common work habits that sabotage your productivity. The first offender on my list was how frequently you check your email. As I was writing my last article, I found that there was a ton of information on that topic, and it was really deserving of its own dedicated article.

When it comes to our work email, most of us see it as a ball and chain. We’ve constantly got to be checking it, or risk the wrath of the bosses and co-workers that are trying to communicate with us. If we don’t respond to an email within 5 minutes, we’re seen as lazy or unproductive.

But according to some experts, checking your email too frequently is actually a major factor that can contribute to diminished productivity. If you are one of those “every time my phone dings I must check my email immediately” sort of people, read on to discover why you may have become your own worst enemy.

How Often is Normal?

So just how often does the average person check their email in a given day? It’s hard to track down reliable statistics. According to one poll, about 40% of people surveyed that they thought they checked their email between 6 and 20 times per day. Of course, it’s hard to say how accurate a person is when gauging their own email habits.

Another survey says that 56.4% of people only check their email between 0-5 times per day. However, that study is from 2009, and arguably quite dated.

“Never Check Your Email in the Morning”

Oprah’s favorite organizational expert is a woman called Julie Morgenstern, author of “Never Check Email in the Morning.” Guess what she advises?

According to Morgenstern, checking your email first thing when you get into the office each morning is problematic because it can a false sense of accomplishment. You answer 40 emails, and you feel like you’ve done a lot of work, but in reality you probably still have piles of paperwork, meetings, and phone calls to make. Answering email is essential to doing your work, but it isn’t always something that is actively making money for you or your company.

Productivity expert Sid Savara also agrees with Morgenstern. “When it comes to email, ignorance is bliss.  That’s why if you’ve got something important you want to make progress on, I have these four words for you: Don’t check your email. As soon as you get up, work on something important for 30-45 minutes, and only then check it. If you can stand it, wait even longer.  Some days I don’t check email at all until after lunch…Any new information you get can cause you to get distracted. I can’t control everything, but I can control my own self made distractions.”

The 24-Hour Method

Other people argue that rather than check your emails starting later in the day, you should just check them once per day, in the morning. Among the members of this camp is productivity expert Elizabeth Grace Saunders. She generally clears out her inbox during the first 1-2 hours of her day, and formulates her game plan for the rest of the day after that. After that, she doesn’t generally look at her email again for the rest of the day, allowing her to focus completely on business development and client projects.

This is harder, of course, if you are at the bottom of the food chain at your company. But if you are in upper management or you are self-employed, setting this routine can be a great way to boost your productivity.

When in Doubt, Check the Chart

Scott Scheper checks his email twice a day, and has created a handy flow chart for helping you to blow through all the unread messages in your inbox.

Every time you open a new email, ask yourself 3 basic questions:
1. Is this relevant?
2. Can I solve this?
3. Will it take less than 2 minutes of my time to deal with this?

By following his handy flow chart, you’ll develop a new way to bust through your inbox more efficiently.

5 A Day

And just in case you hadn’t had enough conflicting expert opinions, here’s one more. Rod Kurtz of Business Week argues that you ought to be checking your work email five times per day.

“Check your inbox only five times daily–first thing in the morning, mid-morning, after lunch, mid-afternoon, and end of day. Or even less if you are capable. This works when you turn off the automatic send/receive function, allowing you up to two hours to focus on your work, rather than to be continually interrupted. It works when you group the sorting of your e-mail, making you more productive and efficient in dealing with it.”

Conclusion

There’s a difference between being busy and being productive. Make sure that you schedule your email time in such a way that you avoid confusing the two. If you approach your email with the correct attitude, you can boost your productivity by leaps and bounds.

In the words of Scott Scheper, “A day filled with shooting the breeze with employees, answering questions, staring at emails, checking social networks and chatting with colleagues won’t make you rich. It’ll make you busy.”

What’s your daily email routine? Do you plan to try any of these tips? Let us know in the comments below!

Tucker is a writer and social media professional living in New England. When she's not staring into a tiny electric box, she engages in pointless acts of stupidity at BadBoozeReview.com and posts daily at MargeryJones.com

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