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Imagine looking at the time, realizing two hours went by, and you haven’t completed your major project for the day.

Has this ever happened to you?

It was August and the scent of lavender and mint blew in through an open window. Somewhere a neighbor was mowing a lawn, and I could hear children at the playground. Ah, the sounds of a home-based office.

And then I wondered:

What the heck am I doing?

Somehow I’d managed to waste time, and I fully blamed the internet. Bad internet!

Except, the internet is not capable of wasting time, so I really had to blame myself.

In that moment, I decided to get my black belt…as an email ninja.

Since attaining my email ninja black belt, I’ve reduced my personal email account from 500 inbox messages to fourteen. I’ve reduced my business email from 200 messages to fewer than twenty.

Thanks to Zen Habits and Tim Ferriss I learned all I needed to know. Use these tips with abandon. I hope you, too, can regain hours by following these steps:

1. Delegate: If you own a business, give your employees the power to make decisions without you. If you need or want to set parameters, fine. Just don’t let piddly emails arranging meetings or handling customer issues take up your time when you already have people to do that for you.

1a. Tim Ferriss, in the Four-Hour Workweek, suggests using “if-then” statements to reduce email. For instance, to arrange a meeting:

Dear X,

I agree that we need to meet about XYZ. How about 1 pm on Monday?

If that time works, please email me back with a yes. If it does not work, please email me with three times that work for your schedule.

Thanks,
Deborah

This technique reduces the back and forth emails that suck up your time. If you can’t make one of the listed times sent back to you, you have two others you can select. After that, you’re done!

2. Eliminate Junk: Get email with a good spam filter. Tim Ferriss recommends Gmail. I don’t use Gmail for my main email — since they give email addresses to Facebook, which makes me uncomfortable — so that’s not an option for me. However, I have an excellent spam filter and rarely receive junk emails.

3. Set Up Folders: With yahoogroups, I make sure to sign up with my options set to “no mail” so I don’t get hundreds of unnecessary posts per day. For listservs, I use the header to filter items into my email folders. That way, I can delete the entire contents of the folder if I’m done with the posts or if there’s nothing I need to see.

4. Answer Email Only Once or Twice Per Day: One of my friends only used to answer email on Saturdays. That seemed sublime to me. I’ve chosen two specific times per day to check my email. That way, I can batch process all of the email at one time instead of allowing emails to interrupt me throughout the day. (In the time I’ve written this post, two or three email notices have popped up in the lower right corner of my screen. Note to self: Turn off that Outlook feature!)

5. Take Care of It Now: Delete or file the email immediately. Be sure to set up folders in your email so you can easily file the emails you want to keep. Use your delete key often. It’s rare I’ve ever had an email that could not somehow be replicated.

6. Unsubscribe from Email Newsletters: Only remain subscribed if you find the newsletter truly useful. I have about two I’m going to continue with, and the others will go bye bye.

Good luck with earning your black belt as an email ninja.

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