You’re passionate about what you do. So, protect the time you spend doing what you love. Too many people let email control their workday.

Karbon HQ Magazine offers some thoughtful pro tips in their article, “10 Email Tips to Increase Productivity and Control your Inbox,” The first three of ten ideas are paraphrased below. You can read the full article here. 

How to ensure email doesn’t impact your real work

1. Have a plan: what’s your ideal day?

Like most things, success with email starts with how you approach it. Email is an extremely high volume activity, so even a small change applied over hundreds and thousands of conversations will add up to a lot of time saved. You need to have a purposeful approach, checking at specific times in the day and then leaving email to focus on other things. 

You should have an ideal day in mind that lays out specific tasks you want to accomplish. This will ensure you always prioritize focused work over email.

For example, when you first sit down at your desk for the day, you might be in the habit of checking email and social media before anything else. Instead, make that first step be to determine the top three things you want to accomplish for the day. Then, block out time to dedicate to these top tasks. During this time, you should close down email completely. 

2. Don’t let email be a constant distraction

To deliver high-value work efficiently and effectively, you need to be able to spend some dedicated time focusing on it, and nothing else. This requires turning off notifications, including ignoring email, so you can achieve a state of deep work. 

3. Dedicated time to complete email

Of course, email is essential for communication and collaboration. So you can’t completely ignore it. A proven way to use email effectively is by allocating specific blocks of time to focus your attention on it. A best practice approach is to take three or four 20-minute blocks each day to work through your inbox.

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There are several productivity tips that can change the way you work by making email more efficient and practical. But, we won't cover them all at once. Take some time this week to reevaluate the way you email and try out one of these tips. Then, check out our upcoming blog posts for a continued series on mastering emails.