I Started Only Checking My Email Every Other Day. Here's What Happened. The change took some time, but it's been transformative for my business—and it's easier than it sounds.
By Kim Kaupe
This story appears in the September 2022 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »
Like most entrepreneurs, my days were once a scattered mess. Now they're productive.
For example, as I'm writing this, it's 5 p.m. and I have triumphantly crossed four things off my to-do list, taken two Zoom meetings, and grabbed lunch with a client-turned-acquaintance — not to mention that I woke up when my alarm went off this morning (no snooze) and put on clothes with buttons (miraculous in a post-Covid world!).
How did I reach this brag-level state of achievement? Have I inhaled the teachings of Tim Ferriss and created a four-hour workweek? (I wish!) Maybe I meditated so hard that I became laser-focused? (Still working on that.) No, the truth is far more boring: I was able to accomplish so much today because of what I didn't do.
I have yet to log in to my email today.
Related: Email Killing Your Productivity? Here Are 9 Ways to Fight Back.
Without the anxiety-inducing ping of a new message in my inbox, I've been freed from accomplishing tasks that are on someone else's to-do list. Instead, I started to accomplish the big, important tasks on my to-do list.
Like everyone I know, I once checked my email obsessively. Even now, as I go full days without looking at it, no amount of green juice can keep me perfectly zen. But I made the change anyway, because I finally realized a great irony: In my effort to be accessible all of the time, I became inaccessible to the tasks that move my consulting business forward.
Email is like a drug, and I don't recommend going off it cold turkey. Instead, do it in phases. I started by simply stepping away from the computer at 6 p.m. Then I started responding to email every two or three hours, instead of one.
Related: It's Time to Stop Using Email as a To-Do List
I realized I wasn't just training myself with these changes; I was also training my clients and everyone else who emails me. When they hear back from me immediately, that's what they come to expect. But when my response time lags, they adjust those expectations — creating a virtuous cycle in which I can get more work done for them.
When I moved to three hours away from the inbox, I added what I think of as an "emergency option" at the bottom of my email signature. It was a note saying that if something is urgent, a person should contact my assistant. Then I included my assistant's email address.
My assistant and I braced for impact, expecting to be flooded with frantic clients. But we were met with silence. After a few weeks, only a handful of people reached out to my assistant or sent "Where are you?!" texts to my phone. It seemed that somewhere along the way, people started solving problems without me — or, better yet, thought long and hard about whether what they were facing should be categorized as an emergency.
I have now worked up to answering my email every other day. My email signature says: "Note: I check my email every other day and try to respond to messages within one to two business days. If there is something urgent, contact my assistant."
Go ahead and copy my homework. Stick that in your signature and see what happens!
There are exceptions to every rule, of course, and I'd be lying if I said there weren't times when I was glued to email dealing with a fire drill. But for every one day of fire drills, there is one month of ping-free, to-do list crushing peace. I've accomplished more tasks in the last year than I have in the last decade of entrepreneurship — all by reclaiming my inbox.
