How do you protect your time and still take care of business?

Being a digital marketer often means dealing with an overflow of emails and near-constant communication. 

On the one hand, holding to strict 9 to 5 availability isn’t always possible, especially when you work with people in multiple time zones. One the other hand, making yourself available at all hours can lead to burnout.

How do you protect your time and still take care of business?

Stop Constantly Checking Email

Nothing kills productivity like unmanaged email habits. Here are five tips to help you gain control of your inbox.

• Start Time Blocking Your Days: If something isn’t in my calendar, it doesn’t get done. Whether it’s a 10-minute asset review or a 2-hour meeting, that chunk of time goes in my calendar because that’s the only way to get an accurate picture of how many hours and minutes I have open each day.

• Bookend Your Day With Email: Block time to check email at the beginning and end of every day. During these times, triage your inbox to identify critical messages that need immediate responses and schedule time for non-urgent replies for later in the day. Google Snooze is a handy way to ‘clear’ your inbox during this process because you can choose what time a snoozed email will resurface in your inbox.

• Prioritize Important Recurring Tasks: Identify your most important daily tasks that aren’t related to email. These might include content creation, campaign setup, data analysis, etc. Then, block time in your calendar to focus on those key tasks. Award yourself bonus points if you can turn off notifications during these periods.

• Set Dedicated Times for Managing Email: To stay focused, block email catch-up periods between the major task blocks in your calendar.

• Set Clear Expectations for Email Responses: Let your team know your schedule for checking email and what they can expect in the way of response times. For example, if you manage email 4 times each day, your team can expect responses in less than 3 hours.

Don’t Answer Phone Calls at Night

Constantly making yourself available at night, well past business hours, will negatively impact your personal life and your sleep patterns. Instead set up a voicemail to let callers know you’ll respond the next business day unless it's a true emergency.

Save picking up and returning non-emergent calls for normal business hours when you're fully available.

Why It Works

Setting these systems and expectations in place with team members and clients will help everyone understand when and how you handle communications, potentially reducing stress on their end as well. 

Emails will get answered and phone calls will be returned, but those responses will happen on a schedule that gives you more time to focus on critical marketing and business activities.

Today's advice provided with insights from Andy Crestodina.