I’m in the midst of reading Tim Ferris‘ The 4-Hour Workweek on my nifty Kindle machine — and while I haven’t yet figured out how to make the radical changes he claims will make it possible for me to cut my work-week by a factor of 10 (or a factor of 20!) and spend the rest of my time hang-gliding in Brazil, he has made some useful suggestions about reducing interruptions and distractions that I’ve already put in place.

Ferris focuses a great deal of attention on email, and my eyes began to glaze over as I began reading what I thought would be some trite suggestions: check your email only periodically, don’t let it control your life, blah blah blah. But as I went further, I realized that most of the work I’ve done to control my has simply focused on eliminating as much spam as possible; the problem is that all of the legitimate email messages that survive my 2,000 spam filters (plus Apple’s built-in junk-mail filter) are likely to have the same priority. And that means I waste far too much time, during the course of the typical day, reading and responding to email from friends, clients, and business colleagues whose messages are relevant — but not life-and-death.

It’s not quite as bad as you might think: I’ve got some quasi-intelligent filtering rules that automatically file email newsletters, newsgroup postings, and other such messages into appropriate folders that I don’t bother looking at more than once a week, or even once a month. But any email from a human being who survives the spam-elimination filters, and who already exists in my email address book, automatically ends up in my “inbox” folder.

And there are several problems with that, the most obvious is that some messages are from “high-priority” people, and others are from … ahem … lower-priority people. But there’s a visible indicator in the mail-program icon that sits in the MacOSX “dock” on the left side of my screen, showing the total number of unread messages in my inbox folder — i.e., both the high-priority messages and the low-priority messages. And it’s compounded by the fact that I’ve configured my mail program to play an audible alarm (which sounds like someone tapping a knife or spoon against the side of a glass) each time a new message arrives in the inbox. And it’s further compounded by the fact that I’ve told my mail program to look for new incoming messages every minute. Tim Ferris suggests getting new messages twice a day (at noon, and 4 PM), which will take me a while to accept; but I have to admit that once a minute is ridiculous ….

Well, mostly ridiculous. It turns out that I get a reasonable amount of email from family members — and I do want to see those messages as soon as they arrive, regardless of whether Mr. Ferris thinks it’s a good idea. I’ll ponder his advice about reducing, if not eliminating, the knee-jerk minute-by-minute reaction to email messages from clients … well, most clients … but it’s everyone else that needs to be handled in a non-distracting fashion.

For the moment, my temporary solution is relatively simple: first (and perhaps most important), I’ve turned off the audible alarm. And second, I’ve added a new filtering “action” to the non-family-member individuals in my address book.

Actually, I haven’t finished the second part, because I actually separate, individual filtering rules for each “significant” friend, client, and business colleague — e.g., with separate color-coding actions so that I can distinguish incoming messages associated with “actual” clients from those associated with “potential” clients. But most of it’s done now; the only ones left are the ones who typically only email me once in a blue moon anyway…

I still have my Mail program checking for new messages every minute; but all of the non-family-member messages automatically get moved into a separate folder that does not contribute to the message-count that I see in my “dock.” And with the audible alarm turned off, I’ve already noticed that I’m likely to ignore the visible message-count when I’m concentrating on real work that I should be concentrating on.

To get a sense of what kind of visual impact this has, take a look at a small portion of my dock, which shows one measly unread email message, and 187 unread blog postings waiting to be read in NetNewsWire. It’s easy to shrug when you see one lonely message sitting in the inbox; but the notion that there are 187 blogs that should be read is enough to make almost anyone start hyperventilating….

Meanwhile, I obviously have to investigate whatever other good ideas Timothy Ferris has in store — it’s nearly midnight, and I still haven’t finished doing everything that I should have accomplished for the day…