Crush Your Inbox! – How To Process Email Faster

How do you cut the time you spend processing, managing and answering your email in half with just one tactic? One of my coaching clients, a self-professed “email junkie” posed this question, looking for an easy way into rehab. If you can relate, imagine for a moment how much easier your life would be with a simple strategy to streamline your email and get ready to Crush Your Inbox! once again …

Are You Addicted To Your Email?
For a lot of us – especially entrepreneurs – email tends to be an “always on” type of thing. Our days are punctuated by the constant “ping” that occurs every time a new message appears (or rather, every time we hit ‘refresh’ to see if there’s something new).

This is death. You’re murdering your time when you do this. Every time you stop and look at that inbox, you’re breaking the flow of whatever it was you were doing in the first place, and you take another one of those little productivity hits that add up fast and steal your day away.

I know you like checking your inbox. We all do – even if we dread the contents. It’s a natural response to gravitate towards some new urgency, but if you’re going to be the master of your inbox and not the slave, you have to decide you’re going to follow through on this simple way to cut your email handling time in half: Only work on your email “on purpose.”

Make Handling Email A Surgical Strike, Not An Emergency Room
When you allow yourself to handle email all day long, you operate in “Emergency Room” mode – everything’s urgent, everything gets a chance to interrupt your flow – and it does, all day long. Instead, what you want to do is handle email on purpose – and that means two things.

First, it means that you don’t let your inbox drive your schedule – you let your schedule drive your inbox. You decide up front, what times of day you’re going to handle your email – and for how long. And you stick to it. That means if you’ve scheduled a half-hour at 9am, 1pm and 5pm to handle your email, you don’t mess with it at any other time. Period.

It sounds restrictive, but in practice it’s really freeing. It makes you focus on other things more rather than being swayed by the new message notification. Your productivity will get a solid boost and you’ll feel less scattered.

And if you’re one of those people who says “I have to be available all the time – I can’t do this!”, let me say this – it is very likely that the world won’t end if you take a few hours to get to your email. When was the last time you had a message which literally couldn’t wait? Give yourself that breathing room. Resist the urge to check that inbox except for your predetermined times.

Now, for some people in certain roles of responsibility, you really do need to be available via email all day. There’s a simple solution for that as well. Decide what the maximum time is that you could possibly go without checking your email and schedule in a few quick checks. When the time comes, look at your inbox, and if there isn’t something that cannot, cannot wait until your next scheduled time, close the inbox immediately. Free yourself already.

Wherever You Are, Be All There
Now comes the second part of handling email “on purpose” – focusing 100% on tearing through your email during your scheduled sessions. When you have to handle email, turn off the phone, close your browsers, lock your door – whatever it takes to give 100% to charging through and getting it all done. This is your time of flow, and you don’t want to have it broken by anything either.

Resist the urge to browse links in your email and get on rabbit trails of “research” or distraction. Focus on responding when you have to, scheduling time to take actions after your email strike, and by all means, deleting as much fluff as possible. And you’ll cut your email processing time in half because you’re focused and ready to kick it when – and only when – the time is right.

So if you haven’t decided when your email checkup times are going to be – and for how long – go ahead and do it now. It’s a habit that will irritate you at fist (don’t all new disciplines?) but payoff almost instantly. And that’s leverage. So get to it now – you’ll thank yourself for it.