Productivity can become an issue at any age or stage of business. How do you master it instead of letting it master you? Read on...Email is one of the biggest obstacles to productivity. Most time management experts advise us to stay out of our email until we complete the most important tasks for the day. While the concept sounds great, most of us don’t have the self-control to do that. Here are some tips for helping us stay focused and organized in a digital world. 1. Check email first.Checking email first thing in the morning can help you avoid the distraction of wondering what’s in your inbox than knowing what’s in your inbox. 2. Mail yourself your morning calendar.Have your Google calendar emailed to you each morning to remind you of your daily commitments. For me, checking this calendar first thing has saved my backside more than once—like when an appointment has slipped my mind overnight. 3. Manage the inbox problem.Be careful with checking email, because it’s all too easy to use our inbox as our to-do list. It’s easy to wake in the morning to your own priorities, and the next thing you know, your spending the day working on other people’s priorities. Asana is a cloud-based project management tool which can help manage the inbox problem. While it is great for collaborating with team members, Asana also allows you to get emails out of your inbox by forwarding them to your to-do list. This gives you the satisfaction of knowing the email is out of your inbox, along with the flexibility of assigning it at your own priority in your existing to-do list. Asana has a paid version, but a lot can be accomplished with the free version. Boomerang is another tool that helps manage email. If you write emails at night, you can schedule them to send the next day. If you’re out of town or in a time crunch, schedule less important emails to come back at a later date. You can also schedule reminders to follow up on sent emails if the recipient doesn’t open your email. That’s one less reminder for your to-do list. Boomerang runs around $50 per year, but the convenience is well worth the investment. 4. Master subscriptions.Unroll.me is another way to keep your inbox manageable. Once you sign up, unroll.me will locate all of your newsletters and subscriptions so you can unsubscribe from them in one place. If you don’t want to unsubscribe, but they’re cluttering your inbox, your can roll them up into one email per day. 5. Make life simpler with canned responses.Gmail and Outlook both have a little known, but life-changing feature called Canned Responses. How often do you receive inquiries for already booked dates, pricing, internships, job availability, etc.? Even if you’re organized enough to keep a folder of email templates, it takes time to grab them and paste them into an email. With Canned Responses, you can save frequently used email templates right in your email account. The next time someone asks you for advice on becoming a wedding planner, you can answer with the click of a mouse. Google “Canned Responses” for easy instructions on setting it up. 6. Schedule appointments online.A lot of time can be wasted on back-and-forth emails with potential clients regarding appointments. You can avoid email tag by offering clients the ability to schedule phone or in-person appointments online. (I offer a phone meeting first, so I can prescreen potential clients.) TimeTrade.com and Book.me are two programs that offer free scheduling options. When you set them up, you can choose blocks of time in which you’re generally willing to meet—for example, Mondays through Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and from 5 - 6 p.m.). Sync the scheduling app with your personal online calendar so that as you schedule work and personal appointments, that time becomes unavailable for booking. When someone does schedule an appointment, you’ll be notified by email or text. You can also set it up so you both receive email or text reminders. Some potential clients will still choose to contact you by phone or email. Yet by sharing the link to the appointment scheduler in your email or on voicemail, you can avoid a great deal of back-and-forth scheduling.7. Put everything on hold to get work done.Email Pause is a new computer app that allows you to pause your email while you’re working on a project. Enabling an autoreply lets senders know you won’t be seeing their email immediately. Once you complete your project and unpause your email, those held will appear in your inbox. 8. Get help staying focused.Momentum Dash is a dashboard designed to keep you focused and out of your email during the workday. The dashboard fills your screen with a pretty picture, a motivational quote, and a place to type your main focus of the day. Each time you open a new window, the dashboard fills your screen and blocks the tempting option of checking email. Instead, you’re reminded of your main focus, which really does help with overall focus. The motivational quote is tweet-able, so you can check off one social media task first thing in the morning. You can customize your dashboard with a quick-links section for frequently visited sites, a to-do list, and more. Some of these recommended tools can be up and running in minutes. Others, such as Asana and the scheduling system, might require a learning curve. However, the time invested will be well worth the effort in the long run. WPM__Sonya Scott, MWP™, A Perfect Day!, Knoxville, Tenn.