Richard Kuo’s Personal Blog : Optimize your life #3 - how to manage e-mail effectively (1/2)

Richard Kuo posts on email efficiency are quite good and cover a few of the best practices for managing your crazy email world (a few of which I covered as well in Inbox Zero). I bring it up here because one of his articles walks you through screengrabs explaining how to shut off noisome auto-check and notifications options in Outlook.

The stats tell me a lot of you folks are on the Windows, so I highly recommend checking this out and seeing if you can’t maybe do with a bit less interruption and time-burgling from your email world.

That’s good for warm fuzzy feelings…but taking hits from the digital crack pipe is hell on personal productivity. And again, unfortunately, I have to be realistic here and acknowledge that the warm fuzzy feelings win out for most people. I surmise that most people haven’t thought about their own productivity hard enough to derive any sort of pleasure from turning the notifications off…I’ve seen far too many people rationalize dumber things already. So while I don’t like the default configurations of e-mail programs, I guess I can’t blame the companies who make the programs either…at a superficial level, it’s what people want.

Now on to specific recommendations for Microsoft Outlook.

Part two in his series shows you how to set up a basic GTD system in Outlook and then do it. Good stuff!