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There’s been a lot of great discussions about email productivity going around on sites I enjoy, so I thought I’d throw in five no-brainers that I’ve seen help a lot of folks.

    1. Shut off auto-check - Either turn off automatic checking completely, or set it to something reasonable, like every 20 minutes or so. If you’re doing anything with new email more than every few minutes, you might want to rethink your approach. Consider ganging your email activity into focused or timed activity every hour or three. Process, tag, respond to the urgent ones, then get the hell back to work.

    2. Pick off easy ones - If you can retire an email with a 1-2 line response (< 2 minutes; pref. 30 seconds), do it now. Deal with the email and get back to work. On the other hand, don’t permit yourself to get caught up in composing an unnecessary 45-minute essay.

    3. Write less - Stop imagining that all your emails need to be epic literature; get better at just keeping the conversation moving by responding quickly and with short actions in the reply. This does not mean that you should write elliptically or bypass standard grammar, capitalization, and punctuation.

    4. Cheat - Use something like MailTemplate to help manage answers to frequent email subjects. Templates let you respond to the questions and requests to which you usually find yourself drafting identical replies over and over from scratch. At least use a template as a basis for your response, and then customize it for that person or situation.

    5. Be honest - If you know in your heart that you’re never going to respond to an email, get it out of sight, archive it, or just delete it.