Loud Thinking March 31, 2014 at 01:17PM
Blast Through an Email Onslaught
Email is one of the biggest productivity challenges that executives face. Sorting through the daily barrage consumes a ridiculous amount of valuable time that could be spent elsewhere. But this is a solvable problem if you learn how to efficiently manage your everyday communications.
Don’t check your email incessantly; only look at it every hour or two.
Discipline yourself to read only the subject matter so that you can discard irrelevant or unimportant messages right away. You can purge more than half of incoming messages this way.
Practice “OHIO” — Only Handle It Once. Immediately decide what to do with each email, and answer important ones quickly instead of filing them away. Because once you’re finally ready to tackle them, you’ll spend half an hour just searching through folders.
Adapted by HBR from “Executives’ Biggest Productivity Challenges, Solved” by Gretchen Gavett.
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