How many emails do you typically get in a day? And how much time do you spend processing them and responding?
My guess: too many emails and too much time. Time that could be spent doing more important things.
And then there’s the time we spend checking our inbox, to see what’s new. I just learned that the average is 88 times per day. Yikes.
We’re drawn to the inbox because we know it might contain something urgent or threatening, or, at the other end of the spectrum, something pleasurable or distracting.
We’re addicted to checking.
The problem is that each time we check our inbox, we lose time switching from the task we were doing before to the email and then back again. How much time? Up to twenty minutes. Yikes.
Now you know why an entire day can go by and you feel like you got nothing done.
No doubt you’ve heard about the habit of checking email just once or twice a day, at pre-determined times. That can help. When you check, make sure you have the time and energy to deal with what’s come in.
Consider doing an “email sprint”. Set a timer for 15 or 20 minutes, get through as many emails as possible, and stop. That should leave you time to work on anything that’s urgent or important.
Oh yeah, you should probably do the same thing with social media. Just saying.
How about a referral sprint?
