Take The 20 Minute Email Challenge (Email Monday)

Are you staying ahead of the curve on managing your emails? How many emails do you get per day? How long does it take you to process them?

The answers to these questions are easy to obtain and vital to your success in the business world.

Here's what to do.

1.    Find out how many messages you get on a given day. Better yet, track how many you get in a week and calculate your daily average.

2.    Set aside 20 minutes to focus on processing your emails.

3.    See how many emails you can process in 20 minutes.

What to do with the results. First, if you would post a comment with how many you did that would be great. Second, you can take the results and book the time you need on your calendar. For instance, let's say that you get about 120 messages per day and you find you can process 40 messages in 20 minutes. You would need to set aside 60 minutes per day to process your messages. So, you might book 30 minutes on your calendar twice a day to go through your email. This is much more efficient than dealing with each message as it comes in.

I first heard about this idea from Sally McGhee's Take Back Your Life!: Using Microsoft  Outlook  to Get Organized and Stay Organized . Her book is a great one to add to your GTD library.

See also

• Get Your Gatekeepers Up
• Scary Email Math