Get More Done, Stop Checking Email

Lately it seems more and more people are complaining about the shear volume of the emails they are receiving on a daily basis. Between customers, friends and family, not to mention spam; we are increasingly getting distracted.

One of the best ways to minimize the distraction is to increase the time period which your email client auto-checks for new emails. Using Outlook, Entourage, Thunderbird, Mail or whatever your favorite email client is, you can change the default auto-check time.

When we first started shop I had the auto-checking set at 1 minute. That worked great for a little while, until I realized I was getting disrupted every few minutes the email “ding.”

By moving my default check time to 30 minutes I now have been able to apply more focus to getting work done, rather then responding to every email I’ve received the minute I receive it.