Good morning.

This is Laura.

Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.

Today's tip is about how to spend less time on email.

Email is an incredibly useful tool.

I started my career working as a journalist, and I learned to report before a lot of people had access to email.

It was a very different experience.

Trying to get people on the phone was often tough.

Sources would call you back while you were on the phone with someone else, so there's a lot of phone tag and since you often had to go through gatekeepers to get people on the phone, it was tempting to keep calling the same people you knew would talk with you.

Email has opened this all up.

Everyone is more accessible.

This is awesome in some ways, and it's also a problem in some other ways.

Accessibility means anyone can email anyone anywhere in the world at any time, and so we do.

I don't have to tell you that email overload is the cause of an incredible amount of workplace stress.

People feel constantly behind.

In My time management fable Juliette School of Possibilities, In one scene, Riley notes that the number of unread messages in her inbox appears to be rising like seconds on a stop watch.

People have told me that reading that scene has made them feel incredibly anxious.

So I wanted to share a strategy that one before Breakfast listener wrote in to tell me was working for her.

She's a project management consultant working for global clients.

That means that I can receive emails at all hours of the day.

She writes, I often wake up in the morning to a full day's worth of emails from Asia and a good chunk from Europe as well.

Usually by the time I get through my responses, the American emails are starting to roll in, with Eastern time emails through my work day and Pacific time emails after I've left the office.

When I first took on this position, she writes, I'd be answering emails at five am, nine am to five pm, and then late into my evening.

This not only led to burn out, but also my responses were less detailed than they should be, and I was being distracted from my other tasks and my personal life.

So she writes, she discovered email BATCHNG.

Here's what she did.

I turned off email notifications entirely and set two one hour long blocks into my calendar.

One in the early morning for Asia and Europe, and one in the afternoon for the Americas.

I then stopped responding to any emails not labeled urgent outside of this time.

So now, if you're listening to this, you may be wondering if all our listeners clients got angry and decided to find other consultants who had respond instantly.

The answer is no.

It was amazing how quickly, without saying anything, clients responded to the shift, she writes.

If anything urgent came up, they used their phones, which is something we too often avoid.

It allowed me to stay on task during the rest of my work day, well also giving thoughtful responses to emails during my designated time blocks.

Sometimes I need more than an hour, she writes, and sometimes I need less, but setting the time in advance allows me to be more productive.

I can be productive not just with email time, but all my time.

She calls this a significant win.

I agree.

What this consultant realized is that, yes, clients want her to be responsive, but the reason they're emailing her is that they think she has great ideas.

They think she can come up with genius solutions to their problems.

If she's constantly on email and constantly moving back and forth between email and other things.

She can't do that, plus her responses are going to be less well thought through than they might be.

The hard truth here is that sometimes you need to disappoint someone's immediate expectation, such as that they will receive an immediate response, in order to meet the bigger expectation, which is an actual solution to their challenges.

So i'd encourage you to try back your email responses now.

Don't worry.

I'm not one of those people who says you should never check email in the morning or only once per day.

For most people, that's really just not workable.

You'll notice that our project management consultant said she would answer stuff marked urgent, and if she's doing that, that means she's looking at her inbox more frequently than twice a day.

It makes sense if someone emails you that your one thirty meeting is canceled, you'd probably like to know that.

If you're not getting a whole lot of email from overseas so you don't need to make sure you respond before the end of another continent's work day, then maybe your response blocks can be at different times, say ten thirty to eleven thirty in the morning rather than really early like six or seven am, and then three thirty to four thirty in the afternoon to get the stuff from the day.

But setting two blocks of time to respond to emails and then maybe two other times to quickly check in for urgent questions means that you're never more than about two hours from seeing someone's email at least during your work day, and that's pretty good.

It also guarantees that you're spending about two and a half hours per work day on email, instead of feeling like you're spending ten hours a day on email.

You could possibly even work fewer hours and make more progress on your big projects if you're not in your inbox all the time.

And hey, I am all in favor of anything that helps people feel less busy while getting more done.

So think about your schedule and whether you could schedule to email response blocks and maybe a few more scheduled quick checks during the day.

If you try it, let me know.

And thanks to our project management consultant for sending in her schedule strategy.

I love to hear from listeners, so if you have a question or a tip, please let me know.

You can email me at before breakfast podcast at iHeart media dot com.

I'll probably be responding, but not more than twice a day.

In the meantime, this is Laura.

Thanks for listening, and here's to making the most of our time.