Never Check E-mail in the Morning is a bestselling book written by Julie Morgenstern. I read it a few years ago. It’s confession time… I need to read it again. I’ve allowed email to take up too much of my valuable production time. Julie says it like this.

“Email is the biggest time-suck of the modern workday. We interrupt ourselves every five minutes to check our in-boxes, hoping for something more interesting, more fun, or more urgent than whatever we’re working on in that moment” – Julie Morgenstern

I am guilty, are you? Let’s work on this together.  

Every evening before bed I review my goals. I have so many things that I want to accomplish and produce this year – yet I have not made a good start on any of them.  As I sipped my coffee early this morning I thought about all that I want to do and tried to figure out a strategy. I decided that I would accomplish something important, maybe even three important things before checking my email. After making this decision I remembered that Julie had written a book about that very thing.

Julie uses a series of “grab and go” strategies in the book. Strategy #11 is: avoid e-mail for the first half hour of the day. I plan to adopt this strategy although I may avoid email for the first two hours of my day. – My habit lately has been to check e-mail first thing.  The fact that I am writing a long overdue blog post proves that this strategy works.

If you, like me, have been literally sucked into your in-box first thing every morning, I challenge you to write down one thing that you want to accomplish in the first part of your day and work on it either to completion, or if it is a large project, complete a vital step toward completion. Work on this priority task before you check your e-mail. I value your feedback. If you decide to adopt this strategy let me know how it works for you.