CBC with Tricia Continues

I’m back with another question from my CBC with Tricia of Time Saver VA. If this is your first time visiting, please check out our first conversation here. You can read her answer to my last question here.
Tricia’s Question for Me:

How often do you check your email?  And does checking your email really seem to eat up your time?

I suppose I have to answer this question honestly don’t I? This is one of my downfalls, but I’m working on it every day. I’m obsessive about checking my email. It used to be I was ok with only checking in the morning and then in the afternoon.

Once my business began to grow and I had more emails coming in it was a bit overwhelming opening my email first thing in the morning and seeing all that I needed to deal with. So I picked up a bad habit…leaving my email program open all the while I was online. It’s very distracting and a habit I certainly don’t recommend! Having it open at all times makes reading and responding to emails even more time consuming, in my opinion than if you just schedule say an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon.

I’m back to only checking it in the morning and afternoon. Ok well I’m working really hard on only checking it twice a day! I schedule 1 hour every day for checking my email first thing in the morning. I schedule 30 minutes every day for checking my email in the afternoon (I have more in the mornings than in the afternoon).

When I know that I have a certain amount of time scheduled to deal with email, it keeps me more focused and on target. When I was in the habit of leaving it open all day, it was too time consuming because I would stop what I was doing when I saw that an email had come in.

I think I got a bit wordy on answering that question. I didn’t mean to ramble so much and I hope it made some sort of sense to you Tricia. Now I have another question for you.

A question for Tricia:

Now that you’ve been working as a VA for awhile, what’s the one piece of advice you would give another newbie coming into this market?