An Idea: Quit checking your emails in the morning. Why?   Because it keeps your head clear and makes your morning so much more productive.

Instead of crises (which make themselves known via email) controlling your morning, you can use the morning to focus exclusively on getting the most important (often non-urgent) things done.  Otherwise (if you’re like me), you’ll find yourself jumping from crisis to crisis and wind up at the end of the day without the most important things being accomplished.

Even if you just check your email and commit to not responding to the afternoon, that is still going to mess up your focus for the morning; you’ll have a hard time concentrating, so better to just not check your email

The credit for this idea goes to Timothy Ferris (he actually recommends working towards checking email only once a week).  I can vouch for it’s effectiveness after following his advice for the past couple months.  Give it a try for a month and see if you ever go back to morning emails.  Seriously.  Try it out!

As far as I know, I invented this: When sending emails, pick random words or phrases in your emails and hyperlink them to images (which can be found using http://images.google.com) that depict the words or phrases they are hyperlinked to.

It is an interesting way to spice up your emails a bit. Here are a couple sample sentences from recent emails I have sent:

• “No pressure.”
• “I read the 16 pages of that book.”
• “Have a nice day.”

After using the image-linking technique, the sentences now read as follows:

• No pressure.
• I read the 16 pages of that book.
• Have a nice day.

It’s basically a waste of time, but hey if you have the time to blow, why some spice up some of your emails?