The video above shows an interview of efficiency expert Julie Morgenstern saying that you shouldn’t check email in the morning. Although others have suggested this, including Tim Ferriss, I can’t say I’ve successfully tried it to the point that it was permanent.

How often do you check email? Do you find any difference in your productivity when you check your email first thing in the morning when you get to work?

No, this isn’t Morbid Theme Day. But it’s a valid question, don’t you think? Hopefully the presentation below can provide you with some answers:

PimpYourWork.com

“The 4 Hour Workweek” by Tim Ferriss has been all over the blogosphere and mainstream media for the past year. The title sounds like a scam or a gimmick, and you half-expect that the official website will be a lengthy one-page sales letter that starts with “Dear Friend”. Thankfully, the reality is different: the official blog has an active community and has some additional ideas that aren’t discussed at length in the book.

The book captivated me, gave me a lot of dangerous ideas, and made me want to try it on my own. In this series of blog posts called “How I Got to the 9-Hour Workweek”, I tell the story of how I took some of the ideas from the book, used whatever applied, and created my own rules. If you’re a fan of the book or simply curious about it, you might be interested in my personal story. So here’s how I got to the 9-hour workweek:

Step 1: I figured out what my work was supposed to be.

This means the work that I love. I love writing, but I don’t like the marketing, client support, and other stuff that comes with it. At the same time, I don’t love all my writing jobs. I had to list the top writing gigs that I loved (regardless of pay) and I defined those as my work. The rest were nonessentials that I had to deal with indirectly.

Step 2: I became ruthless with my email.

What was the leading time sinker of my workweek? Email. It’s a time sinker because I knew that I didn’t have to spend hours a day on it, but that’s exactly what I did. I already wrote about how I conquered my email, so if you want to read about it, click here. Here are some changes I’ve made to the system since then:

The Inbox Zero approach. This is Merlin Mann’s baby (you know, that guy from 43 Folders). To learn more about inbox zero, click here.

Using Gmail as my sole interface. This only applies to 2 major email accounts that I use for people who are trying to contact me personally - not my company or my business partner, etc. The company-related emails are still handled by a virtual assistant.

Why Gmail? Because the search feature is kickass, and it’s web-based. I had to reformat my computer two-times recently, and restoring the Outlook stuff was a bit stressful. I realized that I needed email that I can access from anywhere at anytime and still have the same, comfortable interface. Switching between Outlook and my webmail (whenever I wasn’t at my home computer) drove me nuts.

Minimized rules. My email rules are now for archiving purposes only - like I label all PayPal notices as “paypal” if I want to read all the PayPal payments I received for a certain time period. Plus, some rules direct non-essential emails straight to the archive instead of my inbox, so I won’t feel pressured to read them ASAP.

These were the first steps I took.  Of course, there’s more.

Watch out for part 2 of this series, where I’ll talk about how I applied the 80/20 principle and used outsourcing.

 Photo Credit: Image by Rendy Aryanto  and lusi from sxc.hu

PimpYourWork.com

I don’t know what happened.  I thought I had it under control.

For over a month now, I’ve been relatively email spam-free.  I only got roughly 1 or 2 spam messages in my inbox per week.

The last two days were different.  When I woke up the other morning, I had over 150 messages.  That’s rare in itself.  What’s worse is that roughly 140 of them were spam.

And this hasn’t stopped.

Is this what the Gods of Email Spam give me because I’ve been too boastful about how I tamed email overload? They’re up there, those spam gods, saying “There! Knocked you down a peg or two!” and laughing.  I can hear them.

I’m going to see if I have some more tricks up my sleeve.  I’ll report my progress here.  I’m taking on those Gods of Email Spam!

You want to download an exclusive report or document, but to get to it you need to send in your email address. You know what’s going to happen - these people are going to send you some “newsletters” or, well, spam. If you absolutely need access to something but don’t want to be riddled with unsolicited emails as a result, you can get a throwaway email address from Mailinator.

Here’s how it works:

How do I create an account at Mailinator? It’s simple, you just send email to it. Temporary accounts are created when email arrives for them. First, you give out the mailinator email address you created, and then you check it. It’s that simple.

What email address should I use? Anything you want! You can be bipper@mailinator.com, pinkystinky@mailinator.com, or if you’re a 16-25 year old male you can be bigdaddy@mailinator.com. Just make sure your “anything” is followed by @mailinator.comWhat can I do with the email address? Give it out. Use it in webforms. Post it on forums. Use it any time you need an email address, but don’t want to be slowed down by the sign-up process or spammed for eternity.

Source: Mailinator Official Website

However, make sure that passwords or other sensitive data won’t be sent to your Mailinator address, since almost anyone else can check it. Just use it if you want to access bonus material from a website, or you satisfy that obnoxious man at the bar who keeps asking for your contact info.

This is part 2 of “How I Freed Myself from Mountains of Email“.

After killing off spam and miscellaneous notifications, I did a few more things that are helping me get less email everyday.

Modified Email Rules and Alerts. Incoming mail is now organized based on criteria I set such as the sender (is it a client? relative? affiliate network?) and these criteria help me file email in the proper folders and deal with them there. If, at any given time, I just want to focus on one thing (replying to relatives, greeting clients, or invoicing), I just go to the right folder and find myself dealing with only relevant information.

Killed off an email address. One of my email addresses is too long, informal, and was created when I was in highschool. The only email I get there is either spam or personal messages from highschool friends and some family. I sent a generic email to everyone saying that I will no longer be using that address, and pointed them off to my more commonly used address. I also set up an autoresponder to say the same thing. Now, I check one less email address each day.

Hired a virtual assistant. This new assistant deals with my freelance work emails and customer service. Again, one less email address to check each day. Plus, my clients are probably much happier since someone is always replying to them and dealing with their concerns - something I didn’t get to do when I’m busy. Plus, replying to client emails took so much time that I focused less on the actual work. Now, my VA just sends me a daily summary on incoming emails and how she responded to each. This also helps me learn how to delegate - something that I am usually so afraid to do.

Created a fresh, new, super private email address. When I’ve worked out all the kinks in my system (within this month), this will be the ONLY email address I’ll check. Only very close friends, family, and my VA (the daily reports) can send me emails through this address. Why? Because these are the only people I want to hear from personally, and the only people I want to reply to personally.

My system isn’t perfect, but it’s a big step to better email efficiency. I used to spend at least 3 hours on email tasks alone, and now they don’t even take an hour to complete. Plus, my stress levels have gone down dramatically. That, to me, is the most important result.

How much time do you spend on email daily? How many emails do you receive on an average day? How many of those emails are spam? If anyone has any email efficiency tips or stories to share, please share them with us in the comments.

Image by Lusi, taken from stock.xchng

“One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There’s always more than you can cope with.” - Marshall McLuhan

Too much email can cause insanity. If you think information overload is restricted to your email server and client, you’re either mistaken or a much freer person than I am. Emails, whether they’re spam or not, take up so much of our time - from checking to reading and the thoughts and worries that linger after reading them.

The truth is, I’ve had enough. I no longer wish to be a slave to email! And I think I’m succeeding. Here’s what I’ve done so far.

Tightened spam protection. I made my spam protection cruel. As in take-no-prisoners type of cruel. My Outlook add-ins were good, but the spam was filtered and removed after it showed up on my inbox. So I would still look at it and watch if there were false positives, although false positives never happened. Instead, I went on the server itself and tweaked the spam filters from there to prevent me from receiving spam in my inbox at all. I did make a whitelist of domains to avoid any false positives.

Unsubscribed email notifications from all social networking sites. From now on, any updates, messages, pokes, or whatever coming in from my social network memberships (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) will be viewed on-site, and not via email. It is rare that someone contacts me through these sites, and I really don’t want to receive notifications about who updated their blog, asked a question, or poked me. If this is too drastic for you, most social networking sites allow for a great deal of flexibility when it comes to email notifications - you can be selective about what you receive.

Removed all email notifications from my blogs. This includes personal blogs. Why? Because I write on these blogs regularly anyway, so I can moderate comments and trackbacks before or after I write a post.

Modified mailing list subscriptions. I either unsubscribed to mailing lists I don’t read or opted to view messages via the web rather than in my Inbox. For important mailing lists (re: work), I just opt to receive weekly or daily digests - depending on email frequency.

These are just four steps I took to complete email management. Read on for part 2 of this post.