This is really nothing new but I find that in addition to all of the different tech toys that I have a slightly unhealthy obsession, the addition of the Hipster PDA to my arsenal about 9 months ago has proven very valuable.

It’s a stack of 3×5 cards and a pen.

Actually for me, it is several well placed stacks of 3×5 cards (in my car, on my desk at work, on my desk at home) plus this portable leather “jotter” from Staples which is much more comfortable than a binder clip in my pants. I also have a compact pen pen that is always with the jotter.

Since I “process” the cards from it (GTD), I also keep any receipts in there, rather than make my wallet expand.

I’ve turned a few people on to this, some techies and some not. My biggest surprise was that I’ve actually gotten more use and happiness from my gadgets with this around. I don’t try to make the gadgets do things that they are not suited to do.

And once your email inbox gets too deep to manage, what do you do? You probably scroll up and down to find a message from someone or from three days ago. Maybe you organize your messages into a nested collection of folders for co-workers, clients, projects, friends, humor, etc. If you are lucky, your email has a great search tool or “smart” filtering capability, but most people barely know how to use this at all.

It all just seems like too much work.

What would you do differently if your email program only stored messages for 24 hours?

Or is the question really this: once you have read an email message the first time, what is it still doing in your inbox?

Think about this…You have Outlook open in the background and you start to do some productive work and only 5 minutes later, the new message sound goes off or alert pops up on your screen. Instant interruption. And then your brain starts to debate whether or not to check to see what the message is about. After all, it might be extremely important. So, you flip over to your email program only to find that the message didn’t require your immediate attention, or more likely, was some junk message that you immediately deleted.

The problem is now you are looking at your email inbox only to see hundreds or thousands of messages that you haven’t dealt with. Your productive time is shot because while your computer can have many programs open, your brain can only focus on one thing at a time and right now it is your email inbox. So even if you go back to what you were originally doing, you have only a few more minutes before the next email interruption.

Over the next few weeks and months, I’m going to be writing about how I’ve gotten control over my email inbox in a way that most people find completely inconceivable.

My first tip is this: Close your email program. Not permanently, but for at least two to three hours each day, don’t even have it open. No alerts, sounds, or other email distractions; you have work to do and surely it doesn’t require Outlook to be open.