I have a confession. I am an email junkie. My in box is my to do list and I keep it fastidiously clean. I get an email and deal with it NOW. I get hundreds of emails a day (most of it spam that I have to make sure isn’t legitimate) and this was distracting me to the point of making my productivity on real work go down. I can’t live without email because it’s the bread and butter of my business.
My solution? I simply cut down on the frequency of checking for new mail. Instead of every 5 minutes (I don’t remember if that’s the default in Apple’s Mail or not) I now have it set for every 30 minutes.
Seems like a simple thing but 30 minutes of uninterrupted work is worth it.
Do you have similar problems? What have you done to increase your productivity?
I sometimes log quit out of iChat, skype, safari and mail just to get a few minutes of uninterrupted time
or work later at night after all the “day time” folks have gone to bed 😛