Unleash yourself from that email

During the last six weeks I have been playing with an "auto reply" message that everyone receives when they send me an email. I did this for numerous reasons but the couple main points were:

1. I am no longer tied to email and I can close Outlook when I am working on something and...
2. That people now expect to have a rough idea when I would get back to them, if they didn’t like that... they just need to call me.

After having this message active for the last month and a half, I have received emails from six people asking me if this was something they could copy for their personal work emails, I of course had no problem with it. The message goes something like this:

Hej!

In an effort to increase productivity and efficiency I am beginning a new personal email policy.

I’ve recently realized that I spend more time shuffling through my inbox and less time focused on the task at hand.
It has become an unnecessary distraction that ultimately creates longer lead times on my ever-growing ‘to do’ list.

Going forward I will only be checking/responding to email in the morning at 08:00 CET and after lunch 
at 13:00 CET on business days. I will try and respond to email in a timely manner.

If you need an immediate time-sensitive response... please don’t hesitate to call me. Phones are always more fun anyways.

Hopefully this new approach to email management will result in shorter lead times with more focused & creative work on my part.

Cheers & here’s to life outside of my inbox!

Best regards,
Matt

I do realize this is not possible for everyone, like my wife who seems to be in meetings from 08:00 – 17:00 and has to do email whenever there is chance. If you are hired to just answer email... then obliviously this not for you. I highly recommend giving it a try!

I have to give a huge thank you to Timothy Ferriss for releasing the book called "The 4-Hour Workweek", this is where the idea has come from. I will continue to leave the message on.