Greatest Productivity Booster Ever.

Seriously, why does anyone check email more frequently. It takes me minutes a day to process, I see all of it at once and no one, not ONE person even noticed. In fact, I felt I kept up with people better because I could batch it all at once.

I might even limit myself to every two days now and see how it goes.

For the average person, I see no downside to email once a day. If you do tech support or something through email like that it may be a problem. But for the most part, I would highly recommend everyone try it out.

Here are the steps you can take.

1. Close your email program. Don’t set it to check more often, just close it!
2. Don’t worry about telling anymore, most people won’t notice.
3. Process your entire inbox once a day, don’t leave any emails that you can take care of immediately

I can’t believe I ever had my email set to check every minute. That was a waste of time.

So far, I am loving this email once a day thing. Every day, I check my mail around 4:00pm. instead of this trickle of email, I get a nice solid chunk of emails. I can respond to them all in usually about 10 minutes and that is it. I close my email, never to look at it again for 24 hours.

And no one seems to even notice.

Pretty much everyone agrees that we as humans suck at multitasking. You can do a bunch of stuff at once, but not very well. So people try and clean up their task lists and only do one at a time.

One task that gets forgotten in this cleanup and has become the silent lurker is email. Even when you think you are single tasking, you still have that darn email open. Forever trickling in, distracting you by the minute with worthless information. And that is already excluding all the spam and forwards you get. You probably get, what, one or two emails a day that really matter? And even those don’t need to be responded to immediately. You can sit on them for a day, maybe even more and not worry about them.

So I decided to get crazy and follow many people, though mostly Tim Ferriss’s advice, and stop checking email every minute. That’s right, I had my email set to check every minute of every day! I decided to check it once a day although he suggests cutting it back even more.

I realized that the time you decide to check it pretty important. You want to maximize the amount of email you get, so I decided to go for the late afternoon. That way I can respond to everything that has been sent during the day and people will be able to see my replies that evening (for all those suckers checking every minute!) and respond again.

I decided against an auto reply saying I would only check once a day and not even tell people. I wanted to see if people would explode from wondering what happened to me or issue an missing person’s report. This way I can see if it even mattered or if people would even notice since they are also being bombarded with email.

Well, I didn’t pass out while mowing the lawn. Thankfully. I felt like it a few times but I just drank some water. Here is a picture of me on the front porch during this process.

My 30 hour fast went OK. There was a point where I thought I would pass out any moment but then all of a sudden, I wasn’t really hungry anymore. Like a moment of hunger clarity.

When I was finished, I had a nice big burger. I recommend you do not do that, I didn’t feel so hot.

I ended up losing about 2 pounds, but that is only temporary I’m sure. Overall, it was a success, though I didn’t have any revelations or “Eureka!” moments regarding world peace or anything like that. I thought I would end up feeling more like this guy in the picture.

Well, my 30 hours of no eating started off great. I had a nice big breakfast of an omlet with mushrooms, asparagus, bacon and gouda cheese. Probably about 3 or 4 eggs in it. A couple of slices of toast with pumpkin butter. And some coffee with sugar and cream. This was all before 9:00am mind you.

Then 9:00 rolled around. I was feeling pretty good, although already starting to get a little hungry. But no problem, only 30 hours to go!

Around 11:00, I started to get a little faint from lack of food. I usually have a light snack at least by 11:00 so my body was starting to complain. Plus there was some baking going on in the house, so a nice big cake was staring at me from the kitchen. I could have murdered it if I had a fork.

By noon, I was starving, or “starving marvin” as I like to say. Pathetic, no? I hadn’t eaten in 4 hours and I was already regretting this experiment. WWGD? What Would Gandhi Do? Medidate? Read a book? Plan some non violent resistance? Hell if I knew, so I decided to look him up on Wikipedia.

Gandhi dedicated his life to the wider purpose of discovering truth, or Satya. He tried to achieve this by learning from his own mistakes and conducting experiments on himself. He called his autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth.

Well, look at that, I feel like Gandhi himself! Maybe he was just doing some caloric restriction experiments and used the whole independence for India as a cover story.

I thought about reading a book but I realized I was supposed to be going through my day just like normal. Too bad my normal routine would be to mow the lawn. Stay tuned to see if i pass out or not while mowing the lawn.