One of the tricks to maximising employee performance is to minimise any work that conflicts with your people actually doing what they are being paid to do.

For example, let’s say you employ sales people. You pay them to make sales. So, they’re most productive when they are interacting with customers and potential customers. If you require them to spend several hours a week on paper work and administration, then you reduce their effectiveness. Finding ways to minimise this unproductive time would be essential to maximising their productivity.

Similarly with your managers. Leadership is a contact sport. In order for your first-level managers  to maximise the performance of their team, they need to spend time observing, interacting and communicating with their people. In white collar work places there are two common activities that just get in the way of  managers leading their people for high performance. One of them is email.

The problem is that managers simply become a slave to their inbox. They allow the email they receive to dictate the shape and pace of their day, rather than putting in place routines that enable them to ensure they best use the time they have available. Leaving their email open means they frequently end up treating it as their number one priority. It isn’t. Leaders are paid to get results through others.

I notice that when managers do manage to put in place a structure to control their email, they report that they are much more productive. At the same time, the morale and productivity of their team tends to rise as they start to lead their people more effectively.

The common theme from  leaders who get control is that they learn to turn their email off. At worst, they turn the email pop-up off so they aren’t notified of new emails arriving in their inbox. At best, they keep their email turned off and only clear their inbox twice a day. This means that they aren’t distracted from the tasks at hand throughout the day.

I think of it this way. I have a post office box for my business. I clear it once a week, twice a week tops. If that’s the case, and I have an electronic mail box for my business, why should I be clearing it every 15 minutes? You want to talk to me, give me a call or walk over to my desk. You want to send me an urgent message, text it to my mobile.

Author Tim Ferriss recommends checking your email at 11.00 am and 4.00 pm each day. The rest of the time, leave it turned off. Certainly the feedback Tim gets, suggests that this approach is an effective productivity booster. So do the managers I’ve talked to, who’ve  put this approach into practise.

Of course, there are some other things that you can do as well. Blogger Leo Babauta has additional suggestions for simplifying your life. But in the end, establishing a routine for checking email twice a day, and leaving it turned off the rest of the time, works best of all for boosting personal productivity.

Image by Stephanie Hofschlaeger