Any home business owners rely on email to receive and send work to and from clients. While not all jobs rely on email in this way, many do and even if you don’t you will still use it to contact people whom you can then meet face to face.

But email has a habit of encroaching on your working day, so that every time you hear that ping or see that a new email has come in, you feel obliged to see what it is. It could be a business email, junk email or a missive from Amazon, but regardless of whether it is work related or not you will have broken your concentration and resuming work could take longer than you think.

So how do you fight the battle against email so you are able to work conscientiously at home and not be a slave to checking it every five minutes?

Firstly you need to set parameters to work with. It makes sense to check your emails first thing in the morning because there may have been some urgent message from a business client that has come in since you finished work the previous day. Once that task is done though, avoid checking them again until after lunch. This gives you the whole morning to focus on other tasks that need doing, rather than constantly checking your mails.

Depending on how you access your emails you might want to set the automatic update to only update every hour, rather than every five minutes. This will make it less tempting to see what emails you have received.

Once you have had lunch you can go back into home office, check your business emails and see what has come in during the morning. If anything urgent has cropped up you can deal with it before tackling the afternoon’s work.

This twice a day method will ensure you are not consumed with the need to constantly check your emails. It might take a while to get used to this new habit but it will definitely pay off. And your clients will also soon get used to the fact you only check them twice a day. In fact if you want to let them know in advance how you are doing things, simply put a note in the signature line of your emails telling them that incoming emails are checked twice a day, at 9am and 2pm, or whatever times you plan to look at them.

This will send a clear message that you take your emails seriously and check them every day – but you do so on your own terms. This message will also send a positive message to clients ensuring them that your work comes first and you demand a proper working environment to ensure the best quality work is done.

You might feel strange trying to cut down on the amount of time you spend checking your emails. But once you get used to it you will be amazed by the difference it can make to your home business and working day.

Author Bio: Naz Daud – CityLocal UK Home Franchise Business Work from Home Home Business Email

Category: Business
Keywords: home, business, working, email, distractions, emails, junk email, work, workers, home business