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Yes, we’ve all heard the 80/20 rule. In this case, we’ll approach email. The approach, only check email at 11AM and 4PM. Results, I’ve saved a ton of time. Granted, it’s extremely hard to do, it’s like an addiction. Here are some tips on how to save time with your email:

• Set an auto-reminder letting people know you only respond at certain times. If they really need to reach you, have them call. Chances are they won’t call.
• Delete all spam and miscellaneous emails without even looking at them.
• Clean your inbox every time you go in there. This eliminates the excuse to go into your email and check a task… then checking for new emails.
• If you have a task based on an email, put that task in your to do list categorized by the Covey Quadrant. Chances are the task from that email is not important an can be handled at another time.
• Turn off the bell for Outlook, or close Outlook until the right times.
• Hide the BlackBerry. Just keeping it in front of me was still too tempting. Put it in the desk drawer and out of site.
• Calculate the amount of time you save. I guarantee you’ll save at least an hour.

The average person watches 20-26 hours of tv a week. It’s a staggering number. So, avoid television. If you would spend just half of that time working on something else you would be that much further along in your goals.

So, if you live to were to do this for 40 years, you would have spent 4.8 years watching television. Imagine taking back 4.8 years of your life. What would you have accomplished or done?

Does this sound familiar? You are sitting at your desk working, you have an idea, you research it on the internet. Wow, you think, I found some great information, this gives me another idea. Since this is such a good idea, you think…. I’ll research this other idea and then, before you know it, 30 minutes have passed. Geez, in 30 minutes, I could have finished my work. Well, it happens to all of us. I call this Business ADD.

So, how do you solve business ADD, well the good thing is, you don’t need to see the doctor. An excellent solution to solve this is to do one thing, write it or type it. Since your idea is a great, you don’t want to forget it. So, track it. Personally, my solution involves using Franklin Covey’s time management quadrant and Outlook.

Here’s how it works. Open up Outlook Tasks. Every time you get a great idea or thought, type it into your task list, and get back to work. Set a time of day, let’s say before lunch or before you go home, take a look at the list. Next, go through the list one at a time, if you still think the task is worthwhile, keep it, otherwise delete it. By just doing that, you’ll save yourself at least 30 minutes a day.

Now, if you are getting advanced, there’s another trick. Using Outlook Tasks, create a category for eac of Covey’s 4 quadrants (Important|Urgent, Important|Not Urgent, Not Important|Urgent, Not Important, Not Urgent). Next time you go through your list of tasks, place the task into one of these categories. Now, sort your tasks on category and take a look. You will be amazed at what ideas/tasks are not important at all. Try this for a day, you’ll notice the difference in how much you can accomplish if you stick to the important items.

My dad is my biggest fan. Not too long ago, he sent me a link to the Randy Pausch lecture which can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTugjssqOT0. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but watched it anyway. Since then, I have definitely reanalyzed my life and made it much easier. In fact, for about a week straight, every day, I would just let the lecture run in the background as I worked.

Here’s what I learned. Life is short, make it easy on yourself. But, of course this is more difficult than it seemed. But, I started following what he’s discussed and it’s made a lot of changes. Here are the steps that affected me the most:

1. Follow Covey’s 7 habits of highly successful people
2. Plan out my day, week, month, etc and stick to it. This was much harder than originally anticipated.
3. Analyze my day every evening and see how I can improve upon it.
4. Keep moving forward.
5. Analyze my time. Too much of my day was spent jumping around from task to task. Since then, I’ve been able to reduce the amount of time spent on each activity and eliminate those unnecessary ones.
6. Be proactive.
7. What would you do to help your family if you knew you were going to die soon? How come I’m not doing it now?
8. Ask why? I can accomplish anything or any task, why just tackle the simple ones with quick gratification. And, is this task, thing, really what I should do?
9. Focus. I found it much to easy to start on a tangent while working with the internet 2 milliseconds away.
10. Clean out my inbox every day. This is tricky. But, essentially, I’ll check my email 2-3 times per day. Answer or respond to any email, then categorize/file my emails into the respective areas. For example, I work on a lot of projects. I’ll file my emails in that project. Then, allocate time to each project. This allows me to clean my inbox, establish time for each project, and keep all of the information together.

Listen to it, think about it. You can’t lose anything, but a couple minutes of your time.