You should check your emails (applies to even other sources of communication) through which you get your “work”, regularly, to know what should be on your To-Do list. The “work” here is all that you are responsible for, both on personal and professional fronts.

It always pays to stay current with the entire scope of your work for the best utilization of your time. If you do not know the complete scope of your work, what are the odds that you will choose the right task for a given time slot!

Wait! Did someone tell you to not look at your emails more often? I agree but don’t take the advice blindly. It only meant that you should not break your concentration just to look at every mail that arrived. But there is nothing wrong with looking at emails when you are not into a work that requires concentration or you are into the breaks.

A good practice for processing your sources of communication is to go through the inputs and just note down your actions in your to-do list than actually doing them unless something can be done in less than two minutes.  If there is an action of reading articles on the web you would save them in Read-later App than actually reading them at that moment.

Here are the benefits:

  1. Since you are simply identifying the actions, it should require smaller chunks of time that you get more often and easily.
  2. Keep processing your sources of communication as often as possible so that you don’t accumulate so many items that make you look for bigger chunks of time that you rarely get.
  3. Get comfortable with your Email and other relevant Apps so that working with them should be fun. Learn the settings that make you more productive. For example, a useful setting for processing emails is to open the next mail automatically after closing or deleting one. Also, knowing keyboard shortcuts saves time by having your hands always on your keyboard.
  4. Keep the spirit behind this processing activity in your mind and that should motivate you to do it regularly.

Let me reiterate the spirit: “It always pays to stay current with the entire scope of your work for the best utilization of your time”.

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(featured image: Photo by Torsten Dettlaff from Pexels)