After you have identified the day’s priorities, twice daily (or other specified interval based on email response time requirements), starting with your highest priority email first, quickly act on each Inbox message or determine when you want to act on it:
Act Immediately?
Reply to the message if you can do so in a minute or two.
Delegate the email to someone else as appropriate.
If no response is required, review the message and file it to a Project folder.
Act Later?
Defer messages that you aren’t ready to deal with to a later date.
Create a task from email that requires further action on your part. Assign Projects to tasks as you create them.
Schedule appointments from messages that require a meeting. Assign Projects to appointments as you create them.
No action required?
Unsubscribe from mailing lists or long email threads that you have no interest in.
Use the Delete key to delete messages that you don’t need to keep for archiving purposes.
The end result will be a cleared Inbox and a prioritized task list, allowing you to focus on your work rather than your email.
Tip
As you act on email, assign a Project and allow ClearContext to automatically file the original message from the Inbox into a Topic folder.
Tomorrow: Throughout the day, succeed by focusing on your core work