Go Home Email Free: 30 Minute Reads: A Shortcut to Managing Emails for Better Time Management

By Nicholas Bate

You’re half an hour away from an empty inbox!

Why not use your next spare half an hour to skill-up? Each of these short e-books can be read in just 30 minutes. Addressing those painful work problems, and giving practical tools and expert advice to overcome them, the 30 Minute Reads series will make your work-life more productive, less painful and more successful!

A clear inbox equals a clear mind. It’s not an urban myth, it is possible to go e-mail free, and this succinct practical guide will show you how to achieve it.

Also available in a digital bundle with 4 other titles as part of 30 Minute Reads: The business skills collection.

Go Home Email Free will help you:

• Identify the problem and what isn’t working
• Discover the 10 Big Strategies
• Put in place your super-structured, super-easy, 5-day count-down plan to no more pain.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Dec 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9780857085245

Nicholas Bate

Nicholas Bate runs Strategic Edge Ltd, a consultancy that enables individuals to realise and release their full potential. He works extensively with individuals and teams in organisations as similar and different as Microsoft, Marks & Spencer, Philips Electronics and Hudson Global, Intel, as well as many non-corporate organisations.

Book preview

What will this book do for you?

Email. Imagine a psychologist asking for associations with that evocative word:

Pain in the butt, nightmare, wonderful, love it, hate it

Stops me falling asleep in meetings

Spoils my training sessions with delegates who become distracted by incoming mail

Caused my sister to have an accident whilst driving and trying to respond to a text

My toddler hates it when I just go near my phone

Can't stand it when a phone lights up in the cinema

My boyfriend is so rude answering emails when we are trying to have important conversations

It causes so much pressure and stress: my boss expects emails to be answered immediately, even after we have left work

I worry if I notice emails from overseas when I get up during the night

I can work from home. I can work from anywhere. If only it would just sometimes STOP!

Yes, email! Email came from nowhere and came from nowhere so quickly many of us are still trying to decide the best way to handle it. And so far we are not doing very well. Although at its best, the ability to send a long letter to our friend across the world – for free – and get an immediate response is marvellous, the constant email reminders as we try to run a meeting, or perhaps settle down to a romantic meal, are challenging to say the least. The problems are many. We are still growing with a developing product that in its infancy was a joy, but has now become a monster. Once only accessible with a dedicated machine, it can now follow us anywhere. And email is of course just the biggest of the ‘digital interrupters’ followed by texts, updates from Facebook, Twitter and many other social media we might use and others that we haven't even dreamt of yet.

What will this book do for you? Ultimately it will let you drive home – or catch the train or bus – and feel you are genuinely email free until the next working day. It will enable you to switch off both physically and digitally without guilt or anxiety about work and without losing the pleasure of the personal email. And it will do that in the minimum number of words, the least amount of your time and the most easily implemented of suggestions.

Here's the structure of Go Home Email Free

Section1: Back to Basics. Sometimes we lose the plot. What's email good for and absolutely poor at? Resolving this can remove a whole sweep of email challenges.

Section 2: Hang On. Who's in Charge Here? Our first big idea: that you are in charge and you are going to reassert that power and start making some choices.

Section 3: The Big Breakthrough: Find Your Zone. Our second big idea: creating email-free times. And places. And behaviours.

Section 4: Multiple Breakthroughs. And now a whole stack of good ideas such as batching.

Section 5: We Need To Talk. We'll keep coming back to the