Absolutely. Do emails in batches, not one at a time. And my cardinal rule is "decide what you need to do the first time you read the message." (I used to do the same thing you describe, reading & closing, then reading and closing again... terrible! )
I use a similar approach. I agree that this method is widely misunderstood. A particularly bad take is that every email that needs a response must be responded to that day. Instead, I explain the method as "look at every email and decide what you need to do. If you can do it then, do it. If not, mark the message to come back to. (Lots of options: add a flag or label, move to task manager, put in a folder marked "to do".)" Used this way, a major benefit of the method is that you can be sure you have not missed anything important.
100% Susan. Good call. I think if you can reduce the number of times you look at/"touch" an email, that's good practice too. So look at it to process/triage it then look at it again when you need to action it. It's when you end up processing emails, processing them again, processing them again etc that the anxiety can start to build. That is very specific to me, of course, and everyone is different 😃 Thanks for reading and commenting!
Absolutely. Do emails in batches, not one at a time. And my cardinal rule is "decide what you need to do the first time you read the message." (I used to do the same thing you describe, reading & closing, then reading and closing again... terrible! )
I use a similar approach. I agree that this method is widely misunderstood. A particularly bad take is that every email that needs a response must be responded to that day. Instead, I explain the method as "look at every email and decide what you need to do. If you can do it then, do it. If not, mark the message to come back to. (Lots of options: add a flag or label, move to task manager, put in a folder marked "to do".)" Used this way, a major benefit of the method is that you can be sure you have not missed anything important.
100% Susan. Good call. I think if you can reduce the number of times you look at/"touch" an email, that's good practice too. So look at it to process/triage it then look at it again when you need to action it. It's when you end up processing emails, processing them again, processing them again etc that the anxiety can start to build. That is very specific to me, of course, and everyone is different 😃 Thanks for reading and commenting!