I typically check mine in the morning, at lunch, and at the end of the workday. And that's only if I'm involved in active open loop communications. If I don't have any active open loops, then I'll usually check email once or twice a day. Handle your email in batches to increase your efficiency. Experiment with how often you really need to check email. Realize that you're paying a productivity price the more often you check it. Curiosity is not a good enough reason to check email. Have a legitimate business reason for checking email as often as you do. See how infrequently you can push it without causing problems. For many people, once a day or even once every two days will work just fine. Once you check email in the morning, promise yourself that you won't check it again until the end of the day and set a specific time. I'll check my email twice a day so I won't check it again until after 6 p.m. If it's before that time, I won't allow myself to check it. If you get addicted to checking your email too often, you can help break the habit by making it harder to run your email program. Remove the program icon from your desktop or phone and your quick launch bars so you have to hunt for it on the start menu. Or make yourself launch explore and navigate to find the icon from there. Adding extra steps can help break the pattern of impulse checking. If that still doesn't work, set up your email on a separate PC like a laptop that you must boot up every time you want to check email. Number two, use email only for non-urgent communication. Don't turn email into an urgency-driven communication tool. It's not designed for that. If time is of the essence, then pick up the phone. If you have others pressuring you to check your email more often than once or twice a day, such as people that get frustrated if they don't get a reply from you within an hour or two, you need to push back. Let such people know that they should never use email for truly urgent communication with you. If they need a fast reply, they must pick up the phone or visit you in person if you're both co-located. Number three, disable email checking on program startup. Don't set your email program to auto-check email every time you launch the program. You want to be able to send an email at any time during the day without automatically checking email too. You may often need to send emails during the day as part of various tasks, but you don't need to check email at those times. Check email only when there's a legitimate reason for checking. And number four, log your email usage. Create an email log and record how often you check email. You can do this with a sheet of paper. Just record the start and stop times whenever you run your email program. Do it for about a week and see how much time you're spending on email. Is it worth it? If you're checking your email more than 20 times a week without a legitimate reason, you're wasting way too much time. Try giving yourself a daily or weekly email checking quota and once you hit it, you can't check your email anymore until the next day or week when your quota resets. Offer yourself a reward like going to see a movie or going out to dinner the first week you come in under quota. Email is a powerful business and personal communication tool, but it's easily abused. Why? Because it's so easy. Checking and answering email is something you know you can do, so it provides an immediate sense of accomplishment. But it's a hollow victory. And if you spend your days masterfully checking and answering email, you'll go nowhere and crowd out those actions that could really move you ahead. Replace frivolous email abuse with purposeful intention. Use it to enhance your productivity instead of to destroy it. Consciously scrutinize the way you use email, decide what legitimate role it will play in your life, and set boundaries to enforce that role. You just listened to the post titled, Efficient Email by Steve Pavlina of stevepavlina.com. And I'll be right back with my commentary. Everything from our watches to our light bulbs is getting smarter. Isn't it time your e-commerce business caught up? Enter ShipStation, the game-changing solution that's revolutionizing how businesses handle shipping. As someone who's experienced the power of ShipStation firsthand, I can't overstate how transformative it's been for my operations. The ability to manage orders from over 180 platforms in one dashboard is a lifesaver. But what really blew me away was the automation with a click on printing shipping labels and saving hours of manual work. Let's talk about those carrier discounts. We're talking up to 89% off UPS, DHL Express, and USPS rates. It's like having a secret weapon in the competitive world of e-commerce. ShipStation isn't just about saving money though, it's about scaling smart. You can boost efficiency all while bringing your costs down. Lead your e-commerce business into a smarter future with a shipping software that delivers. Switch to ShipStation today. Go to ShipStation.com and use code OLD to sign up for your free 60-day trial. That's ShipStation.com, code OLD. All about life's tricky transitions. Thankfully, Ollie helps you prioritize wellness through every age, life stage, or magnificent mood change. Need a multitasking multivitamin that keeps up with you? How about an essential prenatal for you and baby? Ollie's got you through it all. Life's tricky. Your wellness routine shouldn't be. Get what you need at Ollie.com. Thank you to Steve. This might not be possible in your work environment. I know that if I only checked my email two to three times a day back at my previous office job, I would have been let go. And sometimes urgent emails were sent too, so we really had to be on high alert. But that said, it's definitely possible to implement this in our personal lives because there's a decent chance that we're checking it more than we think, which goes back to point number four from his list, logging your email usage. That might not sound fun, but the truth is, you might feel like you're only checking email a few times a day, but when you start to pay attention, you might notice that it's once an hour, or it's something you do when you're bored or waiting in line at the grocery store. The only way to know the truth is by actually tracking it. So I think that's a good tip. And you only have to track it for like one day, that's the good news. Then once you know, you can try to go back to point number one, which is to set a schedule of when you want to check. And then like you said, answer all of the emails at once. Definitely think it's worth trying. Let me know how you handle your email and what works best for you. But I'll leave it there for today and for now. Hope you have a great rest of your day and I'll see you tomorrow where your optimal life awaits.