Stop answering emails. Seriously. I’ve owned my own business for almost 25 years. I do reasonably little professional reading as I find most books on the topic of management or small business usually just consist of bragging by the authors and I hate wading through 10 chapters to find one or two that contain valuable information which applies to me. The two chapters of the book “the four hour work week” are the ones on delegation and email.

The rest of the book is pretty much garbage to me, but those two chapters really helped my business. When I started telling employees that I don’t check email very often they started solving all of those little problems that don’t require my input on their own.