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.