Productivity Hacks: Hours Back by Shutting Down Email

Turning it off can be difficult. I’m not talking about completely unplugging or being on a deserted island, but turning off your email for big parts of the day. It is something that I’m sure most of us have tried in the past, but never mastered.

Last week, I laid out my concerted effort to become more productive by doing less and focusing more. Email was my first target, and it is a tough one. For the last 8 years, email has been my crutch for a majority of communication both internally and externally. It is an amazing tool that we believe saves time, but in reality it just allows us to multi-task and avoid contact with others.

My goal is to eliminate email as a main productivity hub and instead use it as one of the many vehicles that are situationally or task appropriate. From my struggles both this week and last week, I can report the following (which you should be able to replicate).

1. You have to delete email off your phone

One week without email on my phone has been eye opening. No balls dropped, nobody pissed, nobody screaming- it’s been amazing. Rather than filling each moment opening and archiving emails, I’ve spend more time improving my social media game and have some general downtime. I don’t dread picking up my phone to see what’s happening now and it allows me to deal with things with a clear head instead of having those back and forth email convos that we all know lead to miscommunication and upset feeling.

This has not been easy by any means, and it’s still a habit to reach for my email with coffee or when I’m on the train. Now, I make sure I’m participating with my potential customers everyday on social media and am taking time to think through more complex issues of the day or week. This gives me back 30-60 minutes minimum per day.

2. I can handle nearly 300-400 emails in one (uninterrupted) 45-60 minute sitting, or sit in email for 1-2 hours per day just waiting and responding.

On a normal day, I realized that I was spending most of my day in meetings and email. I would go from meeting to meeting and then spend the in-between time banging out emails. This left no time for:

• The pleasantly unexpected – It is great catching up with friends, colleagues, networking or people you have been meaning to catch up with. I had three impromptu meetings last week, which lead to multiple new venture partnership opportunities. These are quick conversation, less than 30 minutes or so, that happened quickly because I had time to connect. This has also allowed me to me to call my wife on a more regular basis to check in on our baby and life in general. One time a day is usually fine and it’s good to know that I can do that now without feeling like I’m missing out on something else or…multitasking.
• Internal people that matter – My people have questions that don’t fit my neat calendar. They need to be able to set up time to talk for 10 minutes here and there as client and company issues do not care if I have a busy day. It was an eye opener just how many of the questions come up during the week and although you want to make sure your people are focused on executing independently, if they think you are too busy, they won’t ask you questions that they need to ask many times. Making myself more available everyday is critical.

I still don’t have the perfect system for this but currently I am testing out one email session in the morning, one around lunch, and 1-2 in the afternoon. As I continue to make this more of a habit, I will update you on what is working and what isn’t.

3. Week 2 and 3 target: Optimize email further and kill meetings that can be done in the form of quick call or email.

When I look at my calendar for this week, I am not too happy with my progress here. Although I tell myself that I will start to leave 2-3 hours per day open, I see that I have fully booked the better part of two days this week. Why? I continue to prioritize areas of the business that do not need to be prioritized. I typically operate by the following checklist for prioritizing at work. This is a summary of the main buckets:

1. Internal team
2. Clients
3. Clients of Clients
4. Task/Project management

The problem I’m having with this current system is that it doesn’t actually reflect the needs of my team or clients on a daily basis. Needs change dynamically and this schedule actually ensures that weeks in advance my calendar is filled with meetings that may or may not be relevant to the current or soon to be current needs of the business. I reach the week dreading it many times because I know there are other things that I need to be doing based on the needs of the business at that time. Many times it is then too late to move big activities around to accommodate. My goal for this week is to ensure that from now through November that my calendar has at least two hours unblocked for the unexpected and at least two hours dedicated to projects that need to be prioritized that week/month.

Overall, week one was a mini-success and now it is time to tackle meetings. The goal is to continue to fight the good fight with email and now master the other big time suck of meetings that shouldn’t be meetings. Wish me luck and let me know of any suggestions you have for the following?

PS – Asana has been a huge help here and is an amazing tool if I can stick with it this time. Also, props to Meeting Hero which I have began using on another project – TBD if I will need it over Asana but I’m trying to utilize best in class platforms for the next month to see what makes the most sense.

Check out some great Asana blog posts and videos.