Business Built Freedom

The Most Important Key to Stay Ahead of Your Competitors

Read more about the 6 Ps (Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance): https://dorksdelivered.com.au/blog/208-key-to-stay-ahead-of-your-competitors

Watch this episode at: https://youtu.be/8rPur3FhKsU

Can you believe we're 10 days into the new year? It happened so quickly. I'm a stronger believer that life is like a roll of toilet paper. The closer it gets to the end, the faster it goes. Quite seriously, if you haven't watched the last video, it's really important to do so, so you know how to do some planning and stuff like that. If you have, awesome. If you started planning, awesome. If you haven't, that's cool too. Just remember, don't just jump in gung-ho cause it's the new year. My father taught me "prior planner prevents piss poor performance." That's right, six Ps. I find this is something I live by. As someone who has his own business, and has for many years, you need to plan for these things and you need to set priorities as to what's more important and what's less important. If you're not back at work, you still have this optimum opportunity where you've got lots of available time where you can be planning these sort of things and making sure that you are getting a step ahead of your competitors.

What stops you employing remotely? Today, we've been asked this question and it's an interesting one, because here at Dorks Delivered we do hire abroad and think it can be fantastic when done properly. We have people that work within Australia, as well as people that work overseas for us. The reason we decided to hire people remotely was due to a couple of factors. The main one is that we operate an IT company. As part of our business we need to monitor and manage other companies, and a lot of the time we needed to do this overnight. If we can monitor and get the work done during the off-peak time for these companies, we can make sure that they have their uptime and integrity during the day. Remote hiring is perfect for this, and perfect for some parts of our business.

Maybe the daunting factors of employing remotely is what’s stopping you. Hiring remotely is not without its faults, and you must be prepared before you begin to employ remote workers. There are a few things you need to make sure of. Firstly, you need to make sure that you have a system that allows for remote employees to be successful and hold them accountable for their work. You can do this by taking a record of what they're doing, whether that be through screenshots, time entries or some sort of work trail that allows for you to dive in and find out what it is that they are doing. Keeping employees accountable will protect you from being in the dark about how much work is getting done and to what quality work is being produced.

I’ve also found that accountability can empower employees to find new ways that they can improve on workflow. People like being praised and rewarded for their work. If you can demonstrate to them by the processes you put in place that they are part of the team and are important, it is more likely that they will put in maximum effort and give you bloody good results.

For our company, we created very detailed documentation processes, known as our standard operating procedures. This gives us the ability to pass on the information to any of our employees, and that's not just technical staff. That's accounting, bookkeeping, marketing, sales, and technical staff. Everyone has the same standard operating procedures that they can read through so they can understand how to do their job. 

We don't just give them this document and say, "this is how it's done." We actually ask our employees to create the procedures and then have us, as a team, look through all of them and make sure that they're as they should be. We refine and critique these over time. There is no set in stone or hard and fast rules, but we don’t keep it this document and never change it. You want to make sure that your procedure documents always evolving with you. This is a huge thing to overcoming one of the technical aspects of hiring employing remotely. Remember, accountability is key!

You can easily create a similar system. If you did this it would give you more confidence to employing remotely once you know that the work will successfully get done.

Another reason some people hire abroad is to save employment costs. Some people go, "oh, you're moving jobs out of Australia, and that's bad."

In reality, for a lot of work in Australia, the entry point to hire someone is between $40,000 and $60,000. If you're going to be hiring anyone with any technical knowledge or technical skills in whatever the craft is that you're doing business, you could easily be looking at between $85,000 and $160,000+ for a gifted employee.

Those numbers, for most people, push them outside of what would be realistic to run and expand a business. These issues can be avoided if you look abroad. The world is now very globalised, so you can hire a great staff and keep the running costs of your business down without sacrificing quality. By doing this you can limit the business costs being pushed down onto your end users, which is ultimately where they will end up.

If you're hiring someone in Australia for $90,000 but there are staff available overseas for $40,000, that's $50,000 to play with. You could do a whole heap with this saved money. One thing that could be beneficial for new businesses is to use this money to be more competitive with business pricing until you get your name out there and you're able to then offer something more than just having the lowest prices. This shouldn’t be your only point of difference against your competitors,  but that's another story for another blog!

Maybe you are worried about communication not be great if you employ remotely. We actually find that its the opposite. When we hire remotely, what makes it work for our company is the ease of communication through technology. Nowadays you're able to very easily communicate an idea to someone else in the far reaches of the world without too much of a problem. Another plus to this is that it gives you a much wider audience to be able to find the best candidate to suit you and your needs in business.

I could see a lack of knowledge about where to actually hire people as being a reason that stops you employing remotely. Luckily, there many different places to find people as there are lots of different freelance websites out there. Some of the most popular are Freelancer, Upwork, Fiverr and even advertising on SEEK could result in a perfect match.

It's not going to be all roses when you start looking. There's going to be people out there that are amazing, and then there's going to be people out there that are not, just like regular hiring. When hiring remotely you need to go through the same process as you would with a face-to-face interview. Have your same questions set up, have a Skype meeting.

If you want to be super thorough, have another staff member with you to look over any of their body language changes as you're discussing things with them. You can profile them and go through Myers-Briggs test or something similar to make sure that you are hiring someone that's going to mesh in with your team. The fit is very important. Don't just look over it and think, "Wow! I'm saving five dollars an hour. This is going to be amazing." Go through the same hiring process. Keep your integrity and make sure that you're hiring someone that resonates with your business.

It can be a daunting task hiring someone that you don't get to see every day in an office. Ultimately, I believe that hiring remotely does have significantly more rewards. You will be able to have an efficient staffing network and the ability to know that you can operate your business on a 24-hour schedule with a marketplace full of skills that are unsurpassed. You're also helping your carbon footprint and giving people opportunities at having great futures all around the world. There should be nothing that stops you employing people remotely. It can be scary at the start, but if you make sure that you can find someone to help you through these steps you should be good as gold!

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How hot is it? Christmas in Australia. Who thought of that? It's rubbish. Way too hot to do any work but if you're a business owner it's a great time to catch up. One of the things that I love to do around this time because I don't have any friends is, I love going through invoices on a reoccurring schedule and just making sure that you are getting the best deal because there's a lot of hot deals out there in the hot summer's heat.

Read more about reducing your recurring expenses and other cost-cutting techniques: https://dorksdelivered.com.au/blog/201-how-to-save-money-from-your-reoccurring-expenses

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/MzGfxAt4gOE

And for whatever reason when you're with someone for a little while they don't always give you the best deal. A great example would be I paid $1380 a month for a service that after doing a bit of ringing around, maybe about an hours work I was able to get that dropped down to $460 a month. I thought I was going to have to change who I was with and whatever else but they ended up just giving me that price so I was pretty stoked. 

But it would have been better if they had just given me the hot deal that they are giving to all the new people instead of just giving the price that they had been giving me forever so I felt a little bit ripped off but it's definitely a great time to be checking out everything. I myself have just changed electricity providers and that has saved me about $1000 personally per year. So that all adds up and it's just something you can do with a beer in your hand or sitting by the pool if you go to work with your laptop.

Either way, it's a very sensible idea just to pull the reins in so to speak, in this heat on some of your bills and reoccurring expenses. Make sure thatyou've got a bit more there for cash flow. Just a little tip today because I want to get back to the pool myself. Anyway, I'll catch you later. Stay good.

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Read more about achieving short and long-term goals: https://dorksdelivered.com.au/blog/204-how-to-achieve-your-goals-in-2019

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/WDvX-neqKVw

It's now the start of a new year, that's a new you and new business. So what you wanna do is make sure that you really grab it by the horns and you get really excited about it because you want to achieve these things. You set your new year's resolution, and this year you're going to achieve it. And I'm going to help you do that.

Make sure that you start with a few different lists. I love lists. So I normally have a longterm goal list, and that could be anything. It could be a turnover amount. It could be saving for a holiday. It could be whatever you want it to be, but something that's special to you. 

When you've got this longterm goal list, work out a couple of steps behind that you might need to do to achieve those goals. Let's say you wanna make sure that you've got enough processes in place to be able to go on holidays or give yourself a little bit more freedom, maybe step away from the business for a bit. Think of just one task that you can automate.

If your longterm goal is to step away from the business for a bit, it can be as simple as just writing down what you do each day, and then thinking about how you can write that into a document or make a video on that, and ultimately that is gonna let you offset that task to someone else in the future. If you've got it written down and you've committed that to memory that you'll do that task, you can then have someone else start to do that task, or at least know all the different tasks that you need to do routinely. 

So it's a really, really cool idea. So for me, you set small goals, and that could be something as simple as, "I'm gonna start having someone else replace the ink toner."  That could be something simple that you might have to do at the moment.

And then you set bigger goals, "I wanna go on holidays for a month or two months or three months and not have the business go down and require yourself,"  because if you're there and you're on holidays, you don't wanna be mucking around with your business. That's not a holiday. That's just working abroad. And it's not as fun. It doesn't have that same personal touch. 

But make a few lists, three different lists. Short goals, something you wanna achieve this week. Medium goals, something you're gonna achieve this month. And longterm goals, something you'd love to be able to look back on with a beer in next New Year. Stay good. 

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Today I was asked what was my passion and was I able to turn that into a profession. I had to have a think about it because I've been in business for myself now for a number of years. I started my first business when I was only 12, and that continued into an ABN registered company at the soonest possible time of 14 and 9 months. Since then, I've been working constantly. To give you an idea, that means that I've been in business for 19 years or nearly two-thirds of my entire life, which is an achievement by any standard.

When I was asked to think about what it was that was my passion, I realized that I loved automating things. My first business was all about automating things. My second business was all about automating things within a digital IT-connected world. I was able to go into businesses, look at any of their pain points, and then turn those into strengths, save businesses time and money. I apply this not only to my personal life, but to the lives of others, and that is an amazing achievement.

The way that my house works currently, I get home, I've got my sprinklers that come on automatically, that test the moisture content in the soil, only water when it's not too windy because it tests the wind in the area as well. The battery banks in my house get automatically charged by the solar and then flick across at the most cost-effective time to either power the house or import power from the grid. All of my lights are completely automated. When you go to watch a movie, you can comfortably have the movie when you click play turn off all the lights around the house or dim them down into cinema mode. I love automation.

Being able to apply that to businesses, such as Education Queensland, Logan City Council, and a number of other small to medium enterprises throughout Southeast Queensland has really let me glow and shine, and strive forward with what we've been able to achieve for these other businesses. It's a business that started off as a passion, and I only even realized that it was a passion when I started looking back and going, "Okay, everything that I've been doing is all revolving around automation."

The most sensible way to monetize any passion is to find the niche that you sit within. For me, saving companies lots of money is always a great way to achieve this./ Your passion might be making pies, if you are able to make pies that cater to a certain audience, be it super meat eaters or vegans you will stand out in the crowd and can charge a premium for the experience.

Sometimes, just have a think back. What was your passion? Why did you get into whatever you're doing? Try to reignite that flame!

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Starting a business can be hard work. If you're a small business owner or started a business, most of the time you have some sort of drive behind what was the inspiration. Some people get financial backing and some people don't and start from scratch and back themselves. I was lucky enough to be in a professional job where I was able to save enough of a safety net to start the business as a side hustle, while I was still employed by my regular employer. I worked day and night very, very long hours, to make sure that I was able to keep both afloat and both running, without sacrificing the integrity or quality of either. It was a very difficult time. I did that for three years before I'd saved up enough money and had enough of a reoccurring income to be able to justify jumping out and going out on my own.

When I did that, it was by far the best decision I've ever made. I found that I was able to really grow the business and focus all my energy on the one thing that I was enjoying, my passion. Depending on what drives you and what motivates you, might be the decision as to why you're going into business and the direction you want to go with it. A lot of people need to collect their thoughts and write down all of the different reasons. Check out a SWOT analysis and find out why you're actually doing what you're doing. Make sure it's not just a fleeting moment and instead it’s something that you're capable of devoting all of your time towards, because you want to make sure that you are going at it seriously if you're going to do it. Make sure to analyse everything that you do from the start and think about the end goal when you're doing that. Always keep the end in mind, and then work out the steps and the equipment and the expertise that you're going to need beforehand to get there.

Think about what might be a couple of things that are the deciding moments to go, ahh ha!, that moment where you go, I've made it!. That moment might be that you've got enough of an income and a reputation that you're able to quit your day job. Or that moment might be anything, honestly. For me, I had set in stone a couple of different moments, the first was when I was able to quit my day job. The second one was when I went to the bank and they said that I'm able to borrow enough money to afford a house. I thought, well, that is great, and that was only a couple of years after going out it on my own, so that really spoke strongly.

Planning is paramount

There's a saying that my father engrained in me from an early age, it goes, Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance, and you've got to stick with that. There's so many times that people don't plan. Planning is paramount. You need to make sure that you're planning whatever you're doing. You don't want to spend your family's fortune. Set a small budget aside. Maybe you can afford $500 a year, maybe it's $500 a week. It doesn't matter. But set something aside, and then build a little thing. It's called Agile Development, where you're able to build the smallest working part of your business to prove that it's going to work. Once you're confident that it is working, pay yourself back the invested money that you bought out of it, you won’t get your time back out of it just yet.

At this stage, it's a passion project where you're working for free. Don't try and pull money out of it, but if you can pay yourself back the small amount that you put in, you're at least doing better than you do on most pokies

Visit Our Website: https://dorksdelivered.com.au
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We had a question come through earlier about mobile device management, and is it needed within the business world? Now in my opinion as a director of an IT company, I can say 100% that it is needed as soon as you are dealing with a business that uses business critical applications on the devices that they have, or if there's more than 10 devices under management.   The reason I say this, and these are the two different reasons that you'd need to make sure that you've got any sort of mobile device management, is when you're dealing with more than 10 devices you end up having headaches that come about, and you have user issues become more and more prevalent.   The reason that you make sure that they're business critical application is there's no point of managing the mobile device if the end user is just going to be using Facebook. It doesn't make any sense. You're wasting money, and you've created a job for no reason. But if you do have mobile device management it does make setting up emails significantly easier, locking down the device if there's any potentially unwanted website. If the device was stolen or it goes missing you can easily wipe the device if you have a ... Hopefully you don't, but if you ended up having an employee that went postal you can comfortably make sure that you have the integrity of your business data available to you at your fingertips.   Mobile device management in my opinion, it is needed!...but select the business case. If it's more than 10 devices go for it. Most of the time I would say yes, it's necessary. If you've got a business like a courier company, or something like that, or you're using them to track employee's positions on a map it's 100% a fantastic idea. A very, very cheap utility compared to what would've been spent only years ago to be able to keep your assets, whether it be the things that are being carried in their vehicles, or the employees themselves, accountable. 

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 I'm in the security field where we have to keep many, many businesses safe online, day in, day out, 24 hours a day. It's obviously a really, really important idea to make sure your business is safe online. There's lots of free tools and utilities out there, that can help you keep things safe. As the old adage goes, If you can't afford an expensive tool, wait until you see how much the price of a cheap tool will cost you. It can impact your business greatly. We see it all the time, where people don't have tools in place, to keep their business safe.

Here are a few things you need to make sure you have as an absolute minimum:

The Software Bits

For any of your work stations, have a business grade anti-virus. It should be costing you around 100 dollars a year per workstation. If you're paying less than that, you're probably getting less than what you want. With any of your emails, make sure they are protected with what's called an inbound/outbound spam host, or inbound/outbound security filter. What this does, when someone sends you an email, it's a little man in the middle thing that receives the email, looks through it and goes, "Okay. Yep. That doesn't look like spam or it doesn't look like it has a virus. It sends it on its way to you.

Now, it's just a stop-gap measure. Like most things with security, you're fighting the bad guys. Sometimes they're winning, sometimes we're winning, sometimes it looks like no one’s winning. You just want to make sure you have as many measure in place. Having external spam filtering, before it hits your servers, is a very, very smart idea. If you have an online web presence, where you have a website, especially an eCommerce site, where you're bringing in revenue, you need to make sure that you keep the site up to date. There is lot of websites out there, such as Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, and many other different platforms. They have many security updates that come out.

Business owners aren't told when they get these websites developed, that they need to keep them up-to-date and patched and backed up. If you don't do this, you're opening up many doors to unwanted visitors. These unwanted visitors can come in and if it's a site where you are deriving an income from, you'd be able to have them come in and then potentially have that money divert off to them.

Even if it's not an eCommerce site, you can have problems where these people will come, in, and they'll deface your website, and then pass traffic through your site after sending out a lot of spam, not just to the people that you know, but tens of thousands of people every hour, to ask them come to your website, reset a password, where your website may have been changed to look like a major bank, or it may look like a PayPal or something like that. They'll come there and type in the details and then these could be stored within your hosting account.

That is a big problem. It means that you, by being negligent to the fact of keeping your website secure, have aided in a fraudulent activity. That's very bad. That is incredibly bad news. If you're trying to take financial details from unsuspecting people and you're doing that on the site, even if you're negligent, you can be fined and have your website taken down, a cease and desist, and even server hardware be confiscated. You want to make sure your website stays very secure.

This next one isn't as much about security as it is about disaster recovery. If something does go wrong, you should be having your emails backed up. You should be having them backed up in the cloud, you should also have them backed locally. You should also have your work stations backed up. All these things will aide in faster recovery for you, if something does go wrong. Data recovery can cost thousands of dollars per computer through any of the major data recovery outlets. If you don't want to be spending that sort of money and the amount of downtime, it's very, very good to make sure that you have a backup, not just of some files, but an automated backup with a service provider that monitors and verifies the integrity of the data.

The People Bits

That covers off on most of the different things that you should have in place. Now it comes down to the knowledge that you need to have, when visiting different websites. Most of the time, people have a password that's rather easy. That's good news for hackers. A password, if they wanted to get into an operating system like Windows XP, or Windows 7 (I know that's getting a bit older now) can be cracked in as quick as 9 to 12 minutes, if it's 8 characters and it's just dictionary words. If you have something that has a special character in it, like an exclamation mark, or other characters, you're able to increase that time to be hacked significantly.

I say increase the time, because there's no way to really stop someone completely hacking you. Big companies like Sony's and eBay have been hacked. These guys have fantastic security. As I said before, it's all about a cat and mouse game of who is in front with what they're doing. Make sure that you're able to be in front of everyone else, by having a really difficult password. This is the same for your Wi-Fi. If you have Wi-Fi, you want to make sure you have a very difficult password. If it's easy, people will break into it. If it's hard, you can increase the time from five or six minutes with a poorly encrypted WEP connection, upwards of 24 to 48 hours or more for a better encrypted WPA2 encryption.

Now that might not mean much to you, but get your local IT company to make sure it's nice and secure, where no one's going to be jumping in. If it's going to take two days to break in and use your internet, no standard person's going to do that. If you've got online cloud based applications, that are paramount to the success of your business, it's very sensible to use and implement, what's called 2FA, that's 2-Factor Authentication. 2-Factor Authentication will keep you secure. It's too different things that need to be factored in, when you're authenticating. That means, instead of just your username, and then a password that you just remember, there needs to be an extra device.

Normally that comes in the way nowadays of a mobile phone. In the past, there has been other things such as hardware tokens that you press a button and it comes up with a number on it and there's many other different ways that you can have a second device authenticate. Having 2-Factor Authentication means that the hacker would need to have access to your phone, as well as access to that password. Most of the time it's unlikely that that's going to happen.

If you are running a very secure practise, where it is business or you're dealing with other people's user names and passwords, possibly even credit card information, that is when it is very important that you don't just think of it as an option. It is a must. You definitely need to have 2-Factor Authentication. You should also be doing something which is called, IP whitelisting, and blacklisting.

This is kind of like making a tunnel with a a cord straight from the cloud based application to your home and straight from your office, to the cloud based application, so that the hackers can't as easily intercept the data. Another thing that you can put on top of that, is a VPN, which is a virtual private network. This  means that all the data that you're transferring online is encrypted and stays completely away from prying eyes or anyone that might be listening in to what you're doing.

In closing, make sure to have fantastic corporate or high end business grade anti-virus and anti-malware software on any of your devices. Make sure that you're using a difficult password, with multiple ways that it has to be authenticated. For any data that's being transmitted over the internet, it is sensible to make sure it goes through a VPN, that might be locked down to just your business location for access. Hope you had some fun with this. If you have any questions, make sure to let us know.

Visit Our Website: https://dorksdelivered.com.au
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Is remote working worth the hype_Today's question is: Remote working, is it worth the hype? I think this is really, really interesting that I've been asked this question because I'm in a very good position where we are in IT company that operates with companies remotely. And we employ staff that work with us remotely. So we are both the employer, and in a sense the employee of a remote workspace. In my opinion, it definitely helps productivity as long as you're in an environment that allows for it and you've got a mindset of success. You can't have someone who needs to be spoon fed working remotely. You need to make sure that you have the discipline and due diligence to continue to work day in and day out to get the job done, make sure that this is easily viewable, and you don't get ripped off. Let's look at it from both perspectives. I'll start from the employee perspective: You don't want to feel like you're working remotely and you're being asked to do things all around the clock. You want to make sure that your time that you have with your family is valuable time, and you're not being interrupted by work things. Whatever the reason for working from home be it you've been in an incident or accident, or you're trying to reduce your greenhouse emissions down by not driving as much, or if your work's been nice enough to give you the ability to work at home, to spend more time with your family, you need to make sure that you are giving back to your employer in a way that is favourable for them. The best way to do this is to make sure that your employer has accountable systems in place that shows the work that you're doing and shows that it's easily as good or better than an office environment. I've had ups and downs with the different people that I've employed to work with me. You can see the performance change if they happen to be at home with their kids, and their kids are making a lot of noise, I can see that straightaway in the quality of the work that comes through. On the flip side, if their kids are not at home and they don't have that distraction it’s a different story. Let's be honest, we love spending time with family and sometimes you feel like, "Oh, work's getting in the way of that." Especially if you're working from home. When your kids are not there, I can see the productivity go through the roof. And not only through the roof to be on parity with their work counterparts that are working in the office but they in fact excel and exceed past that, because there isn't the distractions. There's no coffee talk banter or anything like that. They're able to sit down and get their job done with minimal to no distractions. It takes the right employee and the right mindset to do that. But that's definitely something that I've found that you can encompass, and you can embrace for it to work for both the employer and the employee. As an employer: You want to make sure the systems that you're putting in place give you full visibility as to what they're doing. That could be things like analytical data where you're able to see how many phone calls they've been making a day, how many reports they've been creating. It obviously depends on the industry. If you're a mechanic and you normally get a certain amount of cars through the shop, and you've decided to start up a mobile service, when you minus the travel time and the minimal tool sets, are they reasonably as efficient as what they would have been if someone took their car in for a general service? Making sure that you've got key performance indicators to measure up against what they're doing, verse what you'd expect the results to be. For any business that's more digitally based such as accountants, solicitors, bookkeepers, IT professionals or any other business where the tool of choice is a computer, you're able to use tools such as Time Doctor, ObserveIT, Time Maniac and a plethora of others that let you record the times that they're spending on different tasks. It shows you how active their mouse and keyboard were, and gives you a screenshot to give you an idea of what were they doing. Obviously if they're reading the latest legal document that you've sent through, it's going to give you a different idea as to the number of keystrokes and mouse scrolls that they're doing. But having a screenshot there shows you, "Okay, I understand. They're currently reading a legal document" gives you another tool in your tool belt that makes it easy to make the decision as to whether or not they're working as they should be. One of the main things that I found always works is having key performance indicators that give you the insight, and give you the knowledge as to where they're standing, and they can then try and match and exceed those for different rewards. In closing, as long as you have the right systems in place I believe that a remote workforce is more efficient, more cost effective and it by far makes for a much better workplace that does not hinder productivity.

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Today I've been asked how to deal with email overload.   Today emails are an essential part to most jobs, and the amount of emails that we are receiving is growing day by day. What I find is there is most people have no solution put in place to manage the influx of emails and stay on top of it. The average company that's been around for a few years will be receiving anywhere between 250 to 500 emails a day. That's for a small company of about five to eight users.  If you have to sit and focus on all of those emails, you'll find that you may never remove yourself from Outlook or Gmail or whatever you're using to read those emails. A great way to remove some of the stress is to trim the bush. Get rid of any of the subscriptions that you don't use regularly. Make sure that you've got a fantastic spam filter in place. This will at least mean that at a minimum the annoyance of having to go through and just delete the spam emails is gone. It doesn’t sound like much but even if it only takes 5 or 10 seconds, and there's 300 of those a day that's 1500 to 3000 seconds a day, or 50 minutes give or take. Near to an hour a day just wasted deleting spam emails. Put a fantastic spam filter in place and make sure that you won't be receiving these to begin with.  Another great tip. If you get to work at 7:00, set a time and go I'm going to go from work to my email reader, read my emails. Once I've finished reading my emails and replying to any emails, close out of Outlook or Gmail. Make sure your phone is not going to be buzzing off telling you emails are coming through and schedule time away. If you don't do this the emails are going to get the better of you. I personally read the emails the moment I get into work. Three and a half hours later I set time aside to read the emails again. I then do that one more time and then right at the end of the day I read the emails. That way I've got four times throughout the day where I'm giving myself the ability to be interrupted and the ability to be able to respond those emails. Most of the time a three and a half hour to four hour gap in between is not going to be the end of the world to the person sending the email, but it is going to mean that you're not getting distractions.  Emails, instant messages and any push notifications are the new time killer in our society. The more that you can get away from, the better your production and productivity's going to be. Use rules to categorise your emails and the importance of your emails. If you know that you've got some A grade clients where when they email through you need to jump and exactly how high they say, make sure that when those emails come through they get flagged accordingly. Equally, if there's emails that come through that are not as important, they could go to a folder that is labelled accordingly. This will let you set a priority over whose emails get responded to first and whose emails get responded to later. If you've allotted 15 minutes to half an hour to read your emails in the morning (depending on the amount that you get) you at least know that you've responded to all of the act now emergency emails and the others can be looked at and reviewed at the next email break.  We employ tools such as RescueTime in our business. What it allows you to do is get some of your freedom back. It gives you some time for downtime and removes some of the pressures that you may have to make sure you're not staying in well passed the hours that you're meant to be at work. It's got a very cool function where you can put it into a mode called Focus Mode, where you can pause any distractions that come in from pop-ups, Facebook messages, emails, and it even connects down to your mobile phone so you're able to regain control over your time and make sure that you're not being disrupted.  I hope this has answered your question and made you a bit more optimised and optimistic towards your day that you're going to be having tomorrow at work. Stay good.