Reducing email distractions

Email has the potential to be very distracting. How many times a day do you check your email? Everytime that little Outlook notification pops up about a new email coming in, don't we all immediately go read it? That's a lot of interruptions in a typical day.

As of this morning, I'm trying out a new way to process email to reduce those distractions. I'm going to check my inbox just three times a day: first thing in the morning, around noon, and at the end of the day. I hope to get that down to two checks a day eventually.

I've turned off the default Outlook notifications. I've removed the Outlook icons from the notification area in the taskbar. I set up a new rule to pop up an alert if I get an urgent email (so if you need me to respond immediately, mark it urgent).

To make sure I don't need to spend much time in my inbox, I use a system very similar to that described in Getting Things Done where I immediately process the items in my inbox. They go into one of several specially named folders I created: @Action - Now, @Action - Soon, @Someday, @Waiting; or they get deleted; or they get moved into one of my reference folders (I have one for each project). The special folders start with "@" to sort them to the top of the folder list in Outlook. By moving things into one of these folders immediately, it keeps the inbox very clean.

@Action - Now is for emails I need to act on today. @Action - Soon is for things I need to act on but at a lower priority. @Someday are things I want to read in more detail and possibly act on later. And @Waiting is for emails that I can't do anything with yet because I'm waiting on someone else.

I'm one of the few people who actually likes the Outlook Today feature in Outlook. I have it configured to show me the next 7 days of my calendar, my task list, and the message counts of my inbox and the four special folders I mentioned above.

I'll let you know how it all works out.