Battling the e-mail addiction

[BenKelly]

Hi All,

I'm new here, so firstly I want to say hello. Like many others, this book has been a thunder bolt. It's made me sit up and realise that there is more to life. I read it at a perfect time. I quit my 60hr+ job about six months ago (then they offered me a different role and doubled my pay, so i stayed another month), and have since thrown myself into leading my life the way I've wanted.

I now have a little cottage, work from home 4 days a week (and have a contingency part time job another 2 days a week as a backup). Things are going really well. I'm sure I could stop the part time work (though I actually quite enjoy it), and I'm earning as much as I was before. The trouble was, I've still been aiming for the deferred life idea of getting rich, then retiring.

So now, I find myself comfortably clueless once again. This book has destroyed my long term plans. And that's awesome.

So much for the short intro.

Back to the point of the post. I switched off my auto send/receive on Outlook yesterday, and removed Gmail from my browser homepage. This morning for the first time ever, I've replied to about 20 or 30 e-mails without interruption - and as I was in the flow, and not getting side tracked by constant interruption, I've gotten them all done in record time. (In fact, I found myself getting angry that no-one was writing back, until I realised I'd turned off the auto-receive)!

My question is, how often do people here check e-mail? I'm already finding it liberating that I now do it once every half an hour, when I want to. To those with more experience, how did you find a rhythm that works for you? Do people in a service industry regularly go more than 24hrs without responding?

Ben

[kingfu]

Congrats on getting yourself out the rat race.

But wow, checking email every 30 mins? I check mine about twice a day. A few suggestions regarding email:

Put something in your sig stating how you deal with email, times you check and how anything important should be delt with via the phone. Problem with email is more you send more you're going to recieve, you'll recieve something like 1.5 replies for every email you send. Worrying. Just use the phone and get it over with on a 5 min chat.

Batch your email, i do mine in 30 min chunks.

Remove yourself off any irrrelevent email lists.

I use GTDinbox for gmail. Lets me catagorize my emails on things i need to take action on, reference, to read/review (which i print out in one batch and read elsewhere like a coffee shop)

I read about some guy either on here or another site whose got a script set up to sms him based on the priority of the emails and instructs his clients to put "IMPORTANT" or "URGENT" in the subject line, the script then sms's when he recieves on of these emails.

Im sure theres plenty of others but thats just off teh top of my head.

[sadu]

A lot depends on what industry you are in, but for me the change from 'checking constantly' to 2-3 times a day was all about training my clients.

If they are expecting a reply today, and you don't reply until tomorrow then you are going to piss them off. Before you can reduce to once a day, you need to train your clients so that they don't expect a reply today. If you can reset their expectations, they won't mind getting a reply tomorrow.

How you do this is up to you. I'm the guy with the 'urgent' script mentioned above -it was easy to educate clients because 90% of my email comes from the same 30 or so people. It was easy enough to notify them individually. If you tend to get one-off emails from hundreds of different people, then my approach won't work for you.

The other good piece of advice mentioned above was to unsubscribe from everything. Either that or use filters to automatically delete newsletters. This will take about a month - make sure you religiously unsubscribe from everything before you delete it, and within a month your email volume will be a lot less.

Good luck, take it slow, and do small incremental improvements.

[jackson]

My email addiction has been out of control I'm only going to check it 1-3 times per day, I have kind of been sitting on e-mail, it's not a full time job!!
I'm looking for e-mails from my other job and sometimes certain people
it must stop!!!

[charliedavis]

I'm still battling this one too. Trouble is much of my work involves me emailing clients so naturally they email back.

I actually now have a VA checking my emails three times a day, although she cannot answer or act on any of the client work so it's really hard to not still check repeatedly myself as well!

[jackson]

wow that's smart. Did you give your VA your password, or do you forward the e-mails?

I run an editing service, I should screen clients by doing a gmail filter to my VA I wouldn't want to give out my password.

[sadu]

It's safe to give your password to your VA. Just set up a few different email addresses, and don't let the highly-sensitive stuff go to the account that the VA is checking.