One of my big issues when managing my own time is not allowing anyone else set my agenda. However, when you are a slave to email, that is exactly what you are doing. At our weekly company meeting, Amy, our sales director, brought up this issue and referred to an article that appeared in our November issue - "Staying Productive in the Information Age." As part of an effort to become more productive, she is going to try to only check emails four times a day. If that fails, she'll limit herself to once an hour. Since that "new mail" icon can be difficult to resist, she can either turn off the alerts, turn email offline, or log out of email completely and keep the BlackBerry out of sight.
Several of the other employees chimed in with how they reduce email distractions. Business development manager Chris Peel said he creates rules in email account to have all his newsletters delivered directly into a designated folder, instead of his inbox, so he is able to see only relevant emails as they come in and view newsletters when he has the time. I subscribe to newsletters under my Gmail account, so that only business-related correspondence is sent to my Outlook inbox.
It is just as important to be respectful of other's time. Instead of distracting others with several emails each day, managing editor Daria Meoli keeps draft emails open for other team members and as thoughts or projects come up, she adds them to the draft email and saves it, but doesn't send it. She sets the email rule to send after a specific time, so the team member receives only one email from her the next morning.
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