How to check email and still stay focused

- In my course on Time Management Fundamentals, I talk about the importance of processing your email. Processing is simply the act of deciding what the next step is, when you'll do it, and where its home is. Yet, in between those officially scheduled processing times, we also need to check our email, right? Maybe something urgent or immediate came in. So how do we handle that checking time but not get distracted because of it? First of all, you want to create a scheduled pattern for checking. Now many people are in the habit of getting notified the moment an email comes in, or they're constantly hitting send and receive. Now we want just enough checking time. The other suggestion that I would make is to move the reading pane to the bottom of your screen. Why? Well, what it does is it limits the number of email that you see on your screen and also gives you quick access to seeing the reading pane for all of the email. If we have all of the email showing up, for instance, on the left side of the screen, it tempts us to multitask by jumping our view back and forth between 20 or 30 email. So again, we can do this many different ways in any email program, but on outlook.com I would go to settings, options, layout, reading pane, show reading pane at bottom. And also, once I go back to my email program, I would drag that reading pane as high as possible, again, limiting how many email I see at the same time. Be careful with links in emails, especially when you're just checking. It's very easy to click on a link, get yourself onto a new website or a social media platform, and the next thing you know, you've completely forgotten about all those email you were just checking. So, avoid clicking on them unless it's absolutely essential. Finally, during your regularly scheduled processing time, bring your email inbox to zero. The idea is to not have any email at the end of each week, or at least at one point during the week. Then the rest of the time we can quickly check the email and stay focused on the work at hand.