Does it feel like email is controlling your life? Find yourself checking your email every 10 minutes during your waking hours? We all lead busy lives, and with increased pressure on productivity, we’re all looking at ways to save time. If you’re like me, you probably receive more than your fair share of email — I receive more than 100 emails a day on average — so how do you cope with increasing email loads?

I have a simple system that has worked for some time, and I’d like to share it. Basically, I tend to use my inbox as an email task list, with the majority of my day-to-day activities found here. I check my email every hour or so, depending on my schedule. I read new emails, then sort through older ones that still remain in my inbox.

“The five Ds” is what I call my approach. As I traverse my inbox, I complete one of five actions with every email:

Do
If the email requires a response or an action, and it will take me less than a minute or two, I’ll do it straight away. Otherwise, I leave it in the inbox for a second perusal.

Delegate
Many of the emails I receive are related to tasks that my business is undertaking. If the email can be handled by a team member closer to the project or topic at hand, I’ll delegate the response to that person.

Defer
If the action or response is going to take longer than the time I have right now, I’ll defer processing it and leave it in my inbox for later. Typically I set aside at least 20-30 minutes per day for those larger responses or tasks.

Drop
If I’ve dealt with the email or there’s no further action required other than me reading it, I’ll drop it into the appropriate subfolder. I typically keep my folder structure minimalist, with just about all email ending up in my “year” folder — for example, “2009″ for this year’s emails. That way, your inbox is compact and tidy.

Delete
If the email is spam or holds no future value for archiving, I’ll delete it. I do hoard emails though; the many gigabytes of email I’ve sent and received over the last decade — and still have — proves this. I tend to keep all emails relating to projects or clients indefinitely.

If you’re nodding your head and thinking, “That sounds a lot like Dave Allen’s Getting Things Done system,” you’d be correct. I haven’t read the book personally, and the approach is my own, but if you’re interested in learning getting, I’ve heard it’s a worthwhile read.

If you find that you treat your inbox like a task list, I’d encourage you to trial this method. Let me know what you think.

This post first appeared as part of Issue 450 of the SitePoint Tribune, a very popular email newsletter that I am co-editor of. Thanks to SitePoint for allowing me to reproduce the work here.

You’ve started tracking your time, and are increasingly aware of the amount of five minute freebies you are currently giving away in support requests and tiny content fixes.

What you need is a way to keep the administration of invoicing those small blocks of time to a minimum — for you, and the person receiving the invoice at your client’s end.

A few years ago, we embraced the idea of prepaid block hours. These have been a savior for us, and we’ve managed to claw back many of the minutes and hours we previously wiped off.

To make things even sweeter for our clients, we offer a discount rate to those who prepay their time, and then we charge those 10 minute fixes to these blocks. At the end of the prepaid block, we send a detailed time sheet for the work we did.

We offer a small discount on our five-hour block, then increase it according to the size of the block; we also have 10-hour, 20-hour, and 50-hour plans. We’ve allowed clients to choose which plan they want and then pay for it up-front, saving everyone the pain of multiple invoices for tiny amounts.

Now, when we’re asked by a client to spend 15 minutes tweaking some content, we simply charge it to this block and then send a report at the end.

Try it out; your clients and, importantly, your bank balance will appreciate the move!

This post first appeared as part of Issue 446 of the SitePoint Tribune, a very popular email newsletter that I am co-editor of. Thanks to SitePoint for allowing me to reproduce the work here.

A common complaint when speaking to managers of web teams, is the often large disconnect between being busy, and the goal of all business, being profitable.

I had the same dilemma years ago. We’d start on projects, feel like we’re doing the hours expected and a few small jobs in between — but we never seemed to make the money we’d calculated.

Where was the profit going? The answer — and one of the best kept secrets — is time. Without an indication of how long it actually took to complete a job, you’ll be unaware if you charged enough for the current job. And when a similar job comes long, you risk underquoting the work, if that’s what has happened.

The first golden rule here is track time on large projects.

Secondly, we’re all bombarded every week with those small “it should only take 15 minutes” jobs. Five of those, and we’re talking about an hour and a quarter a week, perhaps more. How are you tracking those? Gut feel? Stop it!

So you can see why I say that the second golden rule here is track time on the smaller tasks as well.

Ideally, every member of your team (or you, if you’re a freelancer) should clock every minute of the day into a system which allows you to quickly grab some useful details:

How many hours spent on this project this week?
How many hours available for this project before reaching budget?
How many interruptions this week, and what did they cost in time?
How long do those frequently repeated tasks actually take to do?
Once you’ve recorded weeks and months worth of this data, it allows you to accurately predict how similar tasks and projects will take in the future. You may now know that it takes four hours to build a widget. Instead of quoting that “gut feel” of two hours like you’ve done previously, you’ll be able to quote the right amount and win back those losses.

Say you charge $100 an hour, and build five of these widgets every month. That’s 60 a year, and if you’re short-changing yourself two hours every time, that’s a whopping $12,000 a year in losses. Find other repetitive tasks that you’ve been under-quoting (and if you’re only now starting to instigate time tracking, I guarantee you will!) — you’ll start kicking yourself you didn’t do this before now.

You can use any number of methods to record the time: paper time sheets, local computer-based software, or web-based tools. There’s a plethora of different tools available to you, and I’ll list a few of them below for your perusal.

Best of luck, and enjoy the challenges of increasing your billable hours per week!

This post first appeared as part of Issue 446 of the SitePoint Tribune, a very popular email newsletter that I am co-editor of. Thanks to SitePoint for allowing me to reproduce the work here.