Minimizing Your Time on Checking Mails in the Morning with Gmail

Posted by J.J. under GTD, Productivity, Shortcuts | Read the First Comment

The most common habit among people before they start working is that they check their emails first thing in the morning. Averagely, checking and clearing emails might take up to 30-45 minutes in the beginning and it allows interruptions take place and lead them to procrastination.

For those Getting Things Done (GTD) readers, you might have spent more time processing your emails and you’ll sort it out based on the difficulty of the task – for example, some emails require short reply within less than two minutes and some are lengthy, and require more time to respond; these will be arranged into two or more categories respectively.

People nowadays like to share information to others by forwarding mails to their family and friends. It’s very rude to block your friends from sending mails to you. Now, you put the blame on them for the distraction they’ve caused that affect your productivity. No one actually cares how you get things done. What matters most is that you’re able to get things done.

Imagine that you’ve more than hundreds of emails in your inbox, are you willing to spend most of time facing on your computer processing emails during the beginning of work?

How much time you need to process these emails?

Be practical – you just couldn’t finish checking your mails within 10-15 minutes. Instead, you can spend the first 15 minutes in collecting and processing emails. These emails are given statuses – “Do-it now” for short tasks and “Do-it later” for more-than-two-minute tasks. In short, you are giving them statuses but you’re not going to perform any tasks yet.

I’m a Gmail user and I would recommend you to get one if haven’t. This is what I did to manage my inbox:

• Avoid spending more than 10-15 minutes in checking your emails
• Create multiple email accounts
• Unsubscribe unnecessary newsletters
• Use Gmail to create labels to sort your emails during collection and processing stage
• Expand the use of Gmail: Google Calendars and Google Documents
• Integrate the use of Google Reader with Gmail or use multiple tabs on Mozilla Firefox

Avoid spending more than 10-15 minutes in checking your emails

It is preferable that you spend the first 10-15 minutes in processing your emails (group it into two categories – “Do-it now” and “Do-it later” categories) and the other 30-50 minutes to work with the processed emails. If you still have more emails are not processed, repeat the steps as mentioned earlier – spend the first 10-15 minutes in processing emails and so on and so forth.

Note: Merlin Mann has a slide presentation that discusses about Who Moved My Brain? Revaluing Time & Attention. He discussed about the 10/50 Dash technique. Please refer to slide no. 29.

You would probably lose motivation at work when distraction comes to divert your attention on real work when you use most of your time and energy in collecting and processing your inbox messages.

Like Merlin said, Plan your work in small chunks that you can tear through easily.

Unsubscribe unnecessary newsletters

This is what I usually do to newsletters that I hardly read. I’ll unsubscribe those newsletters that I seldom read that keep flooding to my inbox. You have to eliminate any unimportant email newsletters before your inbox turns into a big junk box. If you don’t want to miss any post updates from your favorite blogs, I recommend that you subscribe to your favorite blogs via RSS (I’ll discuss more about viewing RSS feeds in your Gmail later).

Create multiple email accounts

If you don’t want to be rude to your friends by blocking them from forwarding unimportant emails to your mailbox, you can start creating different mail account and inform them to send or forward mails (or junks) to your new mail account. It is alright that you seldom check on your new mail account and it reduces the quantity of messages in your mailbox.

Use Gmail to create labels to sort your emails during collection and processing stage

I like to use the latest version of Gmail in which you’re able to create your own combination of colors for labels. In this case, I’ve created “Quick Action” labels in read and “Pending Projects” in blue. These labels act as your folders and different color labels symbolize different color folders.

Expand the use of Gmail: Google Calendars and Google Documents

If you have time consuming tasks and you would like to set date for it, it’s very convenient to use Google Calendars to organize your schedule especially your daily tasks. I normally use it as a reminder of any upcoming events and also for my pending projects. Furthermore, I would use Google Documents to create and manage “To-do Today Sheet” or daily task list (as mentioned in the Pomodoro Technique).

Integrate the use of Google Reader with Gmail or use multiple tabs on Mozilla Firefox

You are worried that you would miss lots of good stuffs if you unsubscribed email newsletters from your favorite blogs. You can possibly combine the use of Google Reader that handles your RSS feeds of your favorite blogs, with Gmail. But in order to do so, you need to use a Greasemonkey (a Mozilla Firefox add-ons) script to bring Google Reader into Gmail – learn more about it here. In my case, I prefer using open Google Reader in new tab in my Mozilla Firefox browser. It’s my habit of viewing several sites with multiple tabs in my browser as I mentioned about it in my previous post – Mozilla Firefox 3.0.3 Productivity Tip – The Save and Quit Feature.

Related posts:

1. How to Use Gmail to Create Music Playlists
2. CookiePie – Viewing Multiple Gmail Accounts In Mozilla Firefox
3. Mozilla Firefox 3.0.3 Productivity Tip – The Save and Quit Feature
4. How to Use Gmail to View Your PDF Files
5. How to Create Your MP3 Playlist with Gmail

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