Master Your Workday Now: Proven Strategi

Types of E-mail Filing

Core Qualities of Your Life Mission
Let me start by describing what I believe to be the core qualities of an individual’s mission; there are four of them. An individual’s mission is 1) permanent, 2) always positive, 3) very general, and 4) discovered through experience.

And commit to checking e-mail only once every two or three hours, or even less often. Check it only on a schedule,

turn off e-mail notification

If you spend over 30 to 40 percent of your day reading and writing e-mails

you are working on over 20 times per day to attend to e-mail

I agree we should batch up our reading of e-mail, and not read messages as they come in. Research shows it takes several minutes to recover from a work interruption, and that’s what e-mail is. I recommend you turn off your e-mail notification, if needed, to prevent the constant interruptions, and then check mail, say, once an hour.

The mail is no longer “locked” by the presence of tasks.

Unless it is time-urgent, don’t take significant actions on e-mails when you first read them. Instead, quickly place a corresponding action entry in your task system, and continue to read or scan all your new mail to the bottom of your in-box. Then file that mail out of the in-box, and work tasks off your Now Tasks list.

I am a strong proponent of emptying the e-mail in-box every day. The e-mail in-box was designed to play the role of receiving e-mail, not the role of a bulk filing system, and not the role of a task management system