Last Sunday I mentioned how damaging to your productivity and creativity it can be to get distracted by stuff like social media and email.

Email is particularly challenging for many of us as it's how we conduct a lot of business. 

I get questions from customers via email. Notfications from my websites and membership systems. Offers and discussions from business partners.

So I have to use email. It's not something I can avoid to be productive in my job. It's a core part of the job itself.

Now most of the advice I've heard on email productivity is to ration your use of it. Process your emails once in the morning and once in the afternoon, for example.

In fact these days I sometimes get “out of office” email messages from people I've emailed that basically says “in order to be productive I only process my emails once a day – I'll get back to you later”.

The problem is, that's not very responsive.

If I have a customer who can't log in to access their online training course, or a client who wants advice on an upcoming key meeting they're going to it's no good me getting back to them days later when it's convenient for me.

Part of the reason I've built up a decent following is because I'm very responsive rather than aloof and distant. You might do something similar yourself.

So for me I try to read my emails every hour to give me that responsiveness.

But if I'm going to do that I have to be productive at it. So I use a simple system that might work for you too.

Basically I try to process everything just once. One of the big email productivity killers is re-reading the same email multiple times because you read it once and didn't deal with it.

So I go though the emails in my inbox via a quick scan and either:

1. Decide I don't need to do anything with them – they were for information only.

2. Decide I need to take immediate action. So if it's something I can do quickly I'll hit reply or pick up the phone or do whatever action needs to be taken.

3. Decide I need to take action later. if it's something I can't do immediately or will take more than 5 minutes I log the email in my to-do system. I use “Things” on my Mac and by pressing Ctrl-Space it creates a to do list item based on the email with a link back to it so I can always find it when I do the task.

After I've run through all my emails like that I archive the lot to clear out my inbox.

So next time I log into email I only see the new ones. I don't waste time re-reading old ones. I don't lose any things I need to do because I either did them already in step 2, or I tagged them in my to do system in step 3.

And if I made a mistake and need to go back to any of them, they're not deleted – theyre just archived out of my main inbox.

Simple really. And easy to do.

But processing like this means I can be very responsive to emails in 5 minutes every hour.

Of course, if I'm busy I won't check email that hour.

But doing it this way means I can be productive, and I can offer a really responsive service to my customers and subscribers.

Hopefully that might inspire you to create a similar system for yourself.