There’s an easy fix to reduce the amount of time you spend reading and responding to email, says Brittany EB Hardy, owner of Empty Desk Solutions.
“Pretty obvious right? Want to receive less email? Send less email,” she said. “Call or text instead. You’ll spend significantly less time in the email cycle of doom if you focus on sending less.”
Of course, email is inevitable, so Hardy’s team has designated email checking times at 9 a.m., 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. each workday.
“This allows us to quickly answer anything that requires a response and communicate with our clients, even if it’s a simple ‘Got it, we are on it!’ Then we move anything that has a task associated with it to our ‘to-do’ folder to be worked on either that afternoon or the next day,” she said.