Do you ever feel like you’re in a whirlwind of alerts and notifications? There is an off button. At least on your phone, you can shut off notifications, but that’s not always strictly true. If you are in medicine, there is a lot of time that you have to be "on and ready." Since you can't always shut off, what would help is filtering out all non-urgent notifications…. “The meeting room is changed from 23 to 26” “The coffee machine in the 2nd-floor lounge is out of commission and will be repaired by noon.” “Our policy on such and such has been modified”

Email doesn’t really know what’s urgent and what’s not, but there are steps you can take to make your mail app smarter and generally know what you do and do not care about. We’ll provide some tutorials on that in upcoming posts.

There’s also a bigger improvement you can make. If your group can agree that all administrative things go into a single, well-organized location instead of email, you can skip those tutorials and purge a giant source of non-urgent emails plus reduce your time searching for those pieces of administrivia when you need them. You could use any destination to do this: a shared network drive, a SAAS file-sharing system, an intranet, a wiki... You could also use our DocLauncher, which we, of course, think is best, but however you implement it, you’ll see some of your time come back to you, and that’s what we really care about.