And here it is, my Super Email Tip #1, guaranteed to increase your efficiency: Manually Send and Receive.
What?!? How the heck can doing something manually make you more efficient?!? Trust me!
Turning off your automatic Send & Receive schedule and switching to only manually clicking the Send & Receive button CAN make you more efficient, and Iʼll tell you how through a story about how I stumbled across this super tip by accident:
One day when my email was down I didn’t notice it at first. I was hard at work cranking out task after task when I suddenly realized that I was getting a lot of work done. Hmmm, was I on a roll or something? What was the difference in how I was doing things? Donʼt get me wrong, it was a great feeling to be so on top of everything, but I was curious as to why so that I could continue to repeat it. And then it dawned on me – I had become more efficient simply by not being interrupted by new emails arriving! Who knew?
Once I really sat down and thought about it I realized that whenever new emails would automatically arrive I would always go and take a peek, and sometimes I would end up changing what I was doing based on what had just come in. Not altogether a bad thing, but it is a lot harder to finish any tasks if youʼre jumping around all the time, right?
I decided to switch to manually sending and receiving to see how it went, and lo and behold the pattern of increased efficiency continued! So now I like that I have control over when new emails come in. I can work on whatever I want, and when itʼs finished then I will go check my emails.
I know it sounds simple, and maybe a bit bizarre, but give it a try and youʼll see that taking control of your sending and receiving will indeed increase your efficiency.