You don't need a time machine to check email twice daily and still respond to important people quickly.
I strive to check email just twice daily and still respond to clients within 95 minutes. Impossible without a time machine, you say? Nay, it’s quite possible with nothing more than a phone that receives texts, which you already have, and a Gmail account, which you should already have.
Here’s the idea: Batching email to twice a day (I do it at 10 and 2, which used to be the proper driving position) will induce anxiety in even the calmest person, especially when you turn off email notification beeps/buzzes/hair metal guitar solos. What if I miss an important email? Eliminating this anxiety depends on deciding which emails really are important—in my case, those from clients—and then getting notifications via text message when those emails arrive.
Advanced Gmail filters make it simple because you can create one filter that contains the email addresses of all your truly important people, then edit that filter as your list of truly important people shrinks (generally the proper direction) or grows. Somewhat counterintuitively, you need to:
- Throw something like the following in the “Has the words” field of the Gmail filter tool …
{ *@client.com
*@client.org
client@yahoo.com } - Hit “Test Search” to ensure you included all the truly important people.
- On the next screen, check the “Forward it to” box and add/select the mobile number to which you want emails forwarded (e.g. yournumber@txt.att.net; Google the special address for your mobile carrier).
- Rejoice that you’ve delivered yourself from captivity to email.
In the above example, *@client.com is a wildcard that pulls in everything from the client.com domain. You can also just insert a specific email address, as I have with client@yahoo.com.
What do you think? Could you check email just twice a day? Let me know in the comments.
Credits:
- I’d been doing these filters individually (one per client) for a long time before finding this helpful Lifehacker article on advanced Gmail filters.
- Photo by Chaotic Good01.
Disclaimers:
- Don’t try this without an unlimited texting plan.
- Yes, of course I check email at times other than 10 and 2, during various interstitial moments. The helpful principle is to divert attention to email (and away from focused work) just twice daily.
No related posts.
