I don’t think it matters much. I’m not a fan of instant notifications (avg. importance of my email is too low to justify the amount of distraction), but beyond that, checking frequency would be pretty low on my list of email productivity improvements.
I check mine once or twice a day; most of my email is pre-sorted correctly by using a bunch of filters and around a dozen of addresses with different uses and priorities. I don’t think I could work with a global, unsegmented email inbox; I saw a friend use his years ago and it still terrifies me, even with his relatively low inflow (30-50/day).
For me personally, writing email faster. It’s really easy for me to get immersed trying to write the perfect email or forum post and burn through 40-60min without noticing. They’re not even necessarily long, just excessively pruned and reformatted. Getting comfortable with an email with all the important content and okay phrasing saves me a bunch of time.
On second place, priority filtering, i.e. separating email to respond to from subscriptions, offers and notifications. Category filters are nice, but I don’t think they’re making me more productive.
Anything beyond that is kind of marginal for me. Shortcuts for inserting phrases are fun, but I don’t use them that often. If I had to deal with repetitive inquiries, they’d probably be more important.
I don’t think it matters much. I’m not a fan of instant notifications (avg. importance of my email is too low to justify the amount of distraction), but beyond that, checking frequency would be pretty low on my list of email productivity improvements.
I check mine once or twice a day; most of my email is pre-sorted correctly by using a bunch of filters and around a dozen of addresses with different uses and priorities. I don’t think I could work with a global, unsegmented email inbox; I saw a friend use his years ago and it still terrifies me, even with his relatively low inflow (30-50/day).
What would be high on your list, out of interest?
For me personally, writing email faster. It’s really easy for me to get immersed trying to write the perfect email or forum post and burn through 40-60min without noticing. They’re not even necessarily long, just excessively pruned and reformatted. Getting comfortable with an email with all the important content and okay phrasing saves me a bunch of time.
On second place, priority filtering, i.e. separating email to respond to from subscriptions, offers and notifications. Category filters are nice, but I don’t think they’re making me more productive.
Anything beyond that is kind of marginal for me. Shortcuts for inserting phrases are fun, but I don’t use them that often. If I had to deal with repetitive inquiries, they’d probably be more important.
I’d add using keyboard shortcuts, which are available in desktop clients and GMail.