My daily scaffold consists of:

Coffee – grinding beans, making espresso, steaming milk – very nice process, good thinking time.  Sometimes Radio 4 is on in the background.

Review calendar, the hard landscape, the stuff that I have to do today or at a time today.

Do some work, project stuff – not emails.

I try to put off looking at emails until I’ve done at least an hour’s work.

I then have little bits of time throughout the day for checking my emails and my action folder in my emails.

With emails I:

Scan the inbox for trash, junk and bacon (social/newsletters/stuff I’d like to read but not essential) – I move them to the relevant folders.

I scan the inbox for any very quick to respond to emails – and send responses (trying hard to use these guidelines - http://emailcharter.org/ )

What’s normally left are emails that are going to require more in depth responses, or some project work – 2 ways of dealing with these – first, move them all to your action folder, get them out of inbox – next, book some time in to deal with them as a batch, or put time in for particular emails.

It’s not like this everyday, but, I try as much as possible to keep to this routine.