From the course: Time Management Fundamentals

Processing email vs. checking email

From the course: Time Management Fundamentals

Processing email vs. checking email

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At this point, you've likely spent one hour processing e-mail. If you haven't, please pause and schedule this before proceeding. Because our goal is to bring your e-mail inbox to zero at least once per week, you'll likely need to do a little catch-up. But first, we may need to make your inbox more manageable if it holds hundreds or thousands of emails. So let's archive everything older than a reasonable date of your choice. everything older than two months? Use your app's search engine and ask it to display everything older than your chosen date. Select them all and then click archive. Then schedule extra processing spread out over the next month to catch up with everything left in your inbox. Typically one hour per 100 unprocessed emails is about right. Pause this video to schedule that extra time. Now, let's discuss processing e-mail versus checking e-mail. This also applies to messages. At this point, you've already scheduled your regular processing time, around 5 hours per week. But what about e-mail and messages that arrive BEFORE your scheduled processing? Checking e-mail is different than processing, it's just looking at your e-mail and answering one question, can this wait? Meaning, can this wait until my scheduled processing time? Say it's been a few hours since I've processed and I'm checking my e-mail at noon. I scan through the new emails and ask, can this wait until my next processing time? If it can wait, I like to flag it, not because it's high priority, but because it's low. This tells me at a glance, I can ignore it until processing. Some e-mail apps also allow you to snooze the e-mail until your next processing time. If I see an e-mail or message that can't wait, then I process it immediately using what when we're processing. This lets me deal with urgent things in a timely manner, but appropriately delay everything else. Choose a checking schedule that makes sense for your job in industry. Allow 5 to 15 minutes, less time if you check more often. However, be careful not to check messages continually. That leads to switch tasking and lost time. Remember, the average person is checking their messages 10 times per hour. So even if you cut your checking to once per hour, you'll radically reduce switching cost. Take a moment to choose an e-mail checking schedule that makes sense for you. you

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