My favorite email productivity tactic is to do email sprints. The idea is simple. When you get a bit of time during the day, you set a timer for 10, 15, 20, 30 minutes—however long you’ve got to answer some email. Then, in that time, you plow through as many messages as you possibly humanly can.
When the sprint is over, you close down your email client until the next sprint.
That’s it.
Personally, if I have some time left over at the end, I’ll tackle my other various inboxes too: text messages, social media direct messages, and LinkedIn messages included.
This tactic is simple but it provides a bunch of benefits at once:
- You create an artificial deadline to get through your messages, so you spend less time on email.
- You become significantly less distracted by email throughout the day—after all, you only focus on it during your sprints. So you spend less attention on email too.
- People don’t have to wait that long for a response if you schedule a few sprints throughout your day—you stay responsive.
- You get to focus on far more important things than what came into your email inbox. You automatically prioritize your work more intelligently.
Email is an annoyingly essential part of our work. Especially if you do work that’s collaborative, it’s important that you don’t let it take over your life. If you adopt email sprints, it may take you a bit of mental training to stop checking for messages when you’re not in one. But this effort is worthwhile—each time you resist checking, you’ll gain back a bit of attention that you can instead invest into better things.
In doing so, you regain control over your time and attention. Your time and attention become yours, not something that belongs to whoever last sent you an email.
Give them a shot—I personally find that email sprints work wonders for reclaiming time, attention, and energy throughout the day.
