For any of you that work with No Fixed Office, but don’t have access to email all the time you will have found that email is not the be all and end all. For the most part not being able to view and reply to your email’s instantly has not really affected your business that much, and for the most part you can survive without it still.
This can be a good lesson that any one can learn, is that most email’s are not so urgent that they must be replied to minutes after they are received. While some people may make the messages seem urgent, and in need of a reply right now, this is really not what you want to be using email for. Email is that convenience thing, where you can send someone a message for them to reply to when they are able to. For those urgent need a reply now things, there is the Telephone.
In some cases you could potentially find that you are wasting anything up to 1 or 2 hours a day just checking email, reading and then replying to email as needed. What a majority of this time is spent on is the changing of tasks, stopping what you are doing, opening email waiting for the send and receive, then reading what you receive and deciding to to reply or not and then writing your replies.
You could save a lot of this time by simply forgetting email until 4.30 or 4.45 in the afternoon, downloading it once, check and reply as needed and be done with it. If you must maybe check it first thing in the morning as well, but otherwise you could potentially save a lot of the wasted time by getting rid of the wasted time opening email and hitting send and recieve and potentially replying to messages from one person multiple times per day.
Thanks for the post, yes it seems email is part of a job description. Check emails all day, wait for new ones to come.
Emails work for you, you don’t work for emails. Like Joel says, people check all day long and are slaves to their inbox.
So do like he’s saying here, check it once or twice a day. Make a to-do list the night before for work you need to do, and then DO WHAT YOU NEED TO DO, not what the emails of the day tell you.
maximize efficiency