Elizabeth, didn’t read Pausch, but it’s hard for me not to read email first thing in the morning, not even during lunching (Italians though corrected my bad habit).
I check less email now when I set up my rules for incoming emails.

Maja, I agree on working one project at a time, but when you have tons of them – I still do one at a time but continuously during the day, so I don’t miss a thing

I have struggled with same issues as you, multitasking, million of small projects together with a few very big important tasks. I used outlook at work and filled the calender with tasks that had to be done. The most important is to get things out of one’s mind. That is not thinking about all projects at once.

However the nature of my work was constant „suprise projects“ that had to be solved in very little time. If possible I did this immediately as to get them out from the calender. The issue i’ve been dealing with is to estimate the time of things, how do you do this? It’s easy to plan something and perform it but hard to decised how much time it’ll take.

Dealing with e-mails is a huge issue for many these days. I got a great tip from my colleague to have 3 folders in the mailbox.

One is tasks that need to be solved, next one is tasks that need to be done but are more „timeless“ or long run projects, the third and last one is for more „un-important“ things. In this way I scanned the mail as I got them and them put them in the right folder.

Thanks for all the tips that you gave here Danica!

/M

One other thing I’ve learned recently from reading Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture, is to start the day without checking email. Do some productive work first than check email. It’s better not check email all the time (or leave the email on standby on the computer) but to have regular times (2-3 times a day) where I will check it.