Pardon the interruption

Tired of hearing a ding, buzz, or beep every time you get a new message in Outlook? Simply GTD has a 25-second tutorial that shows you how to turn off notifications, while still receiving e-mails.

Another idea I like even better, and one I use myself: set your default Outlook status to "offline," so you can manually send and receive e-mails. This allows you to have full control over when messages flow into your inbox and from your outbox, which eliminates many interruptions altogether. You can focus on the task at hand, and deal with e-mail in "chunks" instead of one at a time.

How do you set Outlook offline? Just right click on the status box on the lower-right- hand corner, and change the setting (see below). Then when you're ready to accept more messages, just hit the send/receive button in the header.