As I mentioned in the initial post, clutter shows up in the form of email, another productivity killer. We all know how it is when you are checking email. Just one email can take you quite a bit of time if you’re not careful. You open an email that makes a request of you and before you know it, you’re off doing something totally different and you’ve wasted 30 minutes.
To stop email from killing your time, stop checking it as soon as you get to your desk or office. Instead, focus on one of your top priorities of the day and check your email 1.5-2 hours into your day and set an addition time during the day to check your email and stick to the time that you’ve set to check and reply to email. Once you set those times, turn off the email notification.
Additionally, to keep your email inbox from getting cluttered, remove yourself from lists that you subscribe to if you’re not reading the emails or if there’s no value in them for you. When you do check email, look for emails that will be easy to answer, do so and get them out of the way. Be sure to look for things that are related to a particular project or client that may be time sensitive. Finally, use the filters in your email to help sort through incoming email. For example, if you have a particular thing that you’re working on and will have related email, create a folder for email specific to that project and a filter to send those emails into that folder. This way, they’re sorted and organized. This will help you streamline things for you.