Look at task list first before email in the morning?

Oct 11, 2016

Here’s a thought that may help some of you. How about if you look at your MYN task list the very first thing in the morning, prior to checking your email Inbox. It may save you a few hours a day.

The reason to do this should be obvious. For many of us, once we jump into our Inbox, we easily get lost in reading all levels of mail, including low priority mail. And we can lose hours. But if we look at our task list first, and jump on the important work first—work we set up days before—we are more likely to make progress on our important work and we’ll be less likely to waste precious time on low priority mail.

Of course the best solution is a compromise of those two:

• Look at the task list to see what’s critical and important for the day.
• Also scan very quickly the Inbox to see if any emergencies have dropped in that can’t wait.
• Decide between those where the best place to start is. Create new tasks from the longer term actions in the email. And then start at the top of the task list.

But if you tend to get lost in email the moment you look at it, the task list is the better place to look first.

Michael