Day 10: Timers and Feedback make Email Clients better

Stay motivated and focused as you go through your email.

Welcome back! Yesterday, we covered the most powerful aspect of the entire 21-day program - a workflow that facilitates incredibly fast, incredibly effective email triage.

Today, we're going to show you tools to make that workflow more automatic and easier to follow. We've packaged the workflow into a mail client designed for quick decisions: The Email Game. In addition to emphasizing the action steps from the workflow, The Email Game adds timers, a feedback loop to help keep you energized, and a report at the end detailing your accomplishments. It's 100% free to use.

If you use Gmail or Google Apps, The Email Game is incredibly easy to use: just type in your email address and get started. It integrates directly with your account, even pulling email addresses from your contacts to autocomplete them and syncing with your labels and calendar.

If you're not on Gmail or Google Apps, we're still working on a version of The Email Game that will work for your mail provider. In the meantime, use our handy timer tool to go through messages using your regular mail client.

Choose your mail provider below. Spend 20 minutes, and see how far you get!

To do: Estimated Time: 20 min

Choose a configuration above to see today's action steps.

Share today's info:

Final Thoughts

Reading email is easy. Taking action is hard. Make sure you are always making progress	Tweet
Use the @emailgame or a per-message timer to stay focused & track stats as you go through email	Tweet
A per-message countdown timer and seeing emails one-at-a-time is an effective combination	Tweet
Just completed my first @emailgame session	Tweet

Today, we added timers and immediate feedback to yesterday's Ultimate Email Workflow. By the end of today's action items, you should start to feel comfortable with the system, and you should be feeling more in command of your digital life.

So far, we've only talked about triage -- clearing messages out of your inbox that don't require a lot of time. Tomorrow, we'll shift our attention to what to do with messages that bring a lot of work along with them.