How Batching my Emails is Saving me Time

After thinking about Facebook lately and the amount of time being spent looking at it, I started looking at other potential areas of time wastage.

How much time are you spending on email?

I will say that if you need to check your email for your work, and it is critical for what you are doing then of course batching your emails might not work for you, but actually it might.

Instead of getting a notification of every single email that hits your inbox, deciding if you should reply, delete or do something else with it, how about trying to batch your email time.

What is batching your email exactly?

In a broad sense it is picking a time or times to check your email. You only check the emails during the agreed time periods and that’s it.

When exactly and how long you spend on your emails is totally up to you and what your needs are.

When do I check my email

After a bit of playing around with the timing and such, I check my email at 10am and again at 4pm, that’s it.  Usually on my desktop or laptop, and I have email syncing turned off on my phone, I still have it on my phone just in case, but haven’t used email on my phone over the last 3 weeks.

I haven’t missed anything important at all, I’ve realised how much time I was wasting in the past just checking email let along replying to it, and I am very happy with how this works for me now.

But what happens if I have an important email I must send

I either note down what I want to send or do in email in my next allocated slot of time, or I might pre write the email so when it comes time to send the email it’s just a quick copy and paste and I’m done.

In Conclusion

Give batching your emails a shot, see if it work for you. One of the biggest things I came to realise is that in the past even though I felt awesome replying to an email super quickly after I received it, no one really cares. The people I am replying to probably won’t check their email for hours anyways.

Make email work for you, don’t work for email.

You’ll find your relationship around email is much better, you’ll have more time to concentrate on more important things.