Never check e-mail again?

SANTA BARBARA, CALIF. -- "The Four Hour Workweek" author Tim Ferriss posted an item called "The Holy Grail: How to Outsource the Inbox and Never Check Email Again" in which he details how he uses aggressive and numerous auto-replies, voice mail and a personal assistant to avoid e-mail "for days or even weeks at a time."

You can and should read all about it, but in a nutshell he uses "rules" to auto-answer e-mail that survives his SpamArrest and Gmail spam filters. E-mails that survive the "rules" make it to his assistant, who answers, deletes, forwards and processes the mail, then gives him a voice-mail concisely listing relevant summaries of the messages he needs to take action on. It all boils down for him to 4-10 minutes of telephone time per day.

How much time do YOU spend on e-mail each day?

Personally, I like my own system, but Ferriss's approach is instructive and thought-provoking, largely because of three elements that make people uncomfortable:

1. Using rules to auto-answer e-mail

2. Using an assistant

3. Forcing yourself to drop the e-mail habit

1. Using rules to auto-answer e-mail

This one gives people the creeps because it involves an impersonal reply to a personal note, and even more so because of the loss of control. However, most of us do this to a minimal degree with "out of office" auto-replies. Imagine taking it a step further, and automatically replying to a second type of e-mail. In my case, I get a lot of e-mail from PR flaks, and it's nice to auto-reply to their queries by letting them know I won't reply but will consider their e-mail. Then consider a third, then a fourth type of e-mail. Before you know it, you've cut hours, days or weeks off each working year.

2. Using an assistant

Here's where Ferriss really challenges us. His book has an awesome chapter about outsourcing -- how easy, inexpensive and profitable it is -- part of which he outsourced the writing of. Services in India and elsewhere make it possible for just about anyone to have an assistant for well under $10 per hour. However, using an assistant to handle e-mail involves giving up even more control, some privacy and possibly some precision.

3. Forcing yourself to drop the e-mail habit

Ah, here we get to the hardest area, but one that looks easiest. The biggest problem with e-mail in general -- whether you embrace any of Ferriss's techniques or not. We're addicted to e-mail. We love e-mail. E-mail makes us feel busy and important and in control. And that's the problem.

E-mail kills more time unnecessarily than any other task in an average company. (Meetings are number two in every sense of the phrase.)

Ferriss wrote that the whole exercise is part of a 12-month experiment. I don't know if you're ready to embark on something like that, but here's an experiment you can try: Use a software or physical stopwatch, and start it every time you work on e-mail, and stop it every time you stop doing e-mail. Add up the time for a total, then review the Sent folder during the period of your experiment.

So, for example, if you average 3 hours a day of e-mail, and do your experiment for a week, check out your Sent folder to get a sense of how much you accomplished in that 15 hours.

The purpose of this experiment is to let you weigh the relative discomfort of the three uncomfortable items listed above, with the discomfort of flushing 15 hours per week (750 hours per year) down the toilet, accomplishing practically nothing.

Radically trimming e-mail time is especially important for those of us constantly traveling, because we have more disconnected time, find ourselves with slower connections, and have so many other extra tasks while traveling.

If you want to do something about e-mail, the first step is to read Ferriss's blog post. The second is to read and consider my column. And the third is to force yourself into the habit of considering every message that comes in, and ask yourself how such messages might be 1) automatically answered; 2) answered by someone else; 3) ignored altogether; or 4) stopped at the source (by asking the sender to do something else besides wasting your time with e-mail).

And if you have e-mail-killing tips beyond what Ferriss and I have proposed, drop me a line. I'd love to hear about them! (And, no, my assistant won't reply.)