How many times a day are you checking your e-mails? 10, 20, 30, continuously? What about reading and answering your e-mails only twice a day?
In his thought provoking book The 4 hour work week, Tim Ferriss recommends that we check our e-mails only twice a day and that we don’t open Outlook first thing in the morning and last thing in the evening!
E-mails are a source of interruption in your daily activities. A translator needs to keep concentrated in order to deliver a good job. If you read your e-mails every time Outlook (or any other software) is “calling” you then you simply lose your concentration. The idea is to “batch your tasks”: wait until you have a certain number of e-mails and answer them all at once.
I used to set up Outlook so my new messages were checked every 5 minutes. A terrible mistake: I was interrupted all the time in my work by (most of the time) unimportant e-mails which did not even require an answer from me. When you are concentrated on one task and you get interrupted, it takes a lot of time to reach a fully concentrated state again.
After reading The 4 hour work week, I decided to give Tim’s method a try: I set up an autoresponder saying something like that:
“Thanks for your e-mail. From now on I will only check and answer my e-mails twice a day: at 11 am and at 4 pm. This is a way for me to work more efficiently and not to be continually interrupted in my work. If you have an urgent request, do not hesitate to call me (phone number). Thanks for your understanding, Jonathan”
Until now I haven’t had any negative reaction to this new measure and some clients of mine even expressed their admiration for so much self-discipline (obviously they don’t really know me J).
More interesting, I have been able to save about 1 hour every day by “batching” this task and I have received only one phone call for an urgent request…
For those interested, I highly recommend this post on Tim Ferriss’ blog. Of course, I also recommend his book, The 4 hour work week, which is filled with tips on how to create more free time in your life (it works to some extent for translators as well…).
Try it yourself! Check your e-mails only twice a day and set up an autoresponder…
How much time are you winning?
Filed under: Time management | Tagged: e-mails, Four hour work week, Tim Ferriss, Time management
This tip alone saves hours of wasted time every week. There are a ton of other great recommendations in his book as well. Something that has helped me out is to find other people to take over parts of my business so I can focus on the essentials. For example, Web 2.0 marketing, posting to blogs, creating web sites, etc can take a HUGE amount of time even if you know what you’re doing. Outsourcing these things to people that know what they’re doing, enjoy doing them, and do them efficiently means lets me focus on other things.
Many small business owners especially will balk at this idea because of the cost. But what is your time really worth and is it worth more to your business to have you building the web site or actually interacting with clients? Of course, you can’t do it all at once…even Tim Ferriss wouldn’t tell you to outsource your life all at once. But you can do it step-by-step with the end goal being to remove yourself from all non-essential parts of your business. For more tips on how to outsource and make sure you get what you pay for, check out my link above.