{"id":482,"date":"2012-04-09T16:03:23","date_gmt":"2012-04-09T22:03:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.joshualyman.com\/?p=482"},"modified":"2012-05-21T13:05:52","modified_gmt":"2012-05-21T19:05:52","slug":"the-two-things-you-should-do-now-to-reduce-email-overload","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.joshualyman.com\/2012\/04\/the-two-things-you-should-do-now-to-reduce-email-overload\/","title":{"rendered":"The two things you should do NOW to reduce email overload"},"content":{"rendered":"

Have 5 minutes? Want to save yourself 15 to 45 minutes every day? Drowning in email? Follow these two simple tips\u00a0and you will find yourself more productive and less overloaded in a matter of days.<\/p>\n

Turn off email alerts<\/h2>\n

\"Desktop<\/a>You may have heard this tip before, but you probably haven’t done it yet. You must<\/em>\u00a0to turn off those little pop-ups that Outlook is giving you every time a new message comes in! The reason is two-fold. First, every time you see one of those windows or hear the new email chime, you are adding to the perceived workload that you have due to emails piling up. Second, if you choose to click on the alert or switch to your email program and proceed to deal with the message, you have just lost several valuable minutes due to task-switching costs once you finish and get back to your primary task. Researchers have found that it takes anywhere from one to sixteen minutes to return to full productivity on the task you were working on before switching to email (Jackson, Dawson & Wilson, 2001<\/a>; Iqbal & Horvitz, 2007<\/a>). With some people checking email every time it comes in, they may never even reach peak productivity during the day. Follow the instructions below to turn off these productivity draining notifications. (See also Microsoft’s instructions<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Video Tutorial<\/h3>\n