Accountants often handle 100-200 emails per day, which equates to 24 hours each week in their inbox. In contrast, some progressive accounting professionals are handling less than 50 emails per day and spending just 6 hours emailing each week. What are they doing differently?

To help you cut down the time you spend dealing with email, here are four strategies these progressive accounting firms are using to rise above their inbox.

Step 1: Be efficient with your email from the start

You need to change the way you interact with your emails when you first look at them. Instead of going through your inbox with no clear system, triage it, prioritizing when you should address everything.

For each email, ask these questions:

• Can you delete it without reading it?

• Can you read it then archive it?

• Can you deal with it instantly (with just a short response)?

• Can someone else from your team action it?

• Does it require a significant amount of time?

Your goal should be to touch each email just once, either acting on it now, assigning it to a colleague, or creating a to-do item for you to address later. Try to break the habit of reading an email and then leaving it to come back to later. You not only run the risk of not getting to it, if you do, you’ll have to spend even more time re-reading it.

Your inbox is not designed to be a to-do list. Process everything in your inbox that you can right there and then, and everything else that requires more time should be turned into a proper to-do item and part of your workflow for the day. Evaluate, take action and move on.

Step 2: Come back three times a day

You might have a habit of scrolling through your inbox as you’re commuting on the train, while you eat breakfast, or even as you lie in bed. Rather than checking email haphazardly during other activities, make visiting your inbox an activity of its own with a set time slot in your day.

Set aside a few specific times—studies have found three times a day is the ideal amount—making sure you allocate enough time to process all of your new messages that have come in since you last ‘triaged’ your inbox.

This is pivotal—checking your inbox is disruptive, breaks you away from your regular work, and then forces you to re-establish context when you get back to it. Going back and forth throughout the day wastes time.