What is the online marketer’s greatest enemy? The Time Eater. And what’s the greatest Time Eater of them all? Your email inbox.

It fills up incessantly with all the latest and hottest must-have methods to make a million by just pushing one button. And unlike sales letters of old where you could scroll down to the end to check the price, state of the art video sales letters don’t even let you fast forward. So you sit there and listen for 20 minutes or more to find out that what they offer is either not for you or out of your financial league or…

That’s how the Time Eater works its way into our bank accounts. Because when we catch up with the latest and hottest must have offers out there, we are not productive.

Here is the tool that instantly kills the Time Eater stone dead.

A digital kitchen timer.

I started using mine couple of weeks ago and my productivity sky rocketed.

How?

When I start a productive task, like writing this blog post, I set the timer – say, 20, 30 or 60 minutes – and then I don’t answer the telephone, I don’t look at emails, Twitter, Facebook and the like, but I just stick with the task at hand. When the time is up, I stop.

You don’t have to buy a timer to use one. There are lots of free ones around such as the Online Stopwatch with countdown timer and stopwatch facilities, or the timer function on your iphone / ipod Touch / smartphone. I recommend you check now or you might be in for a D’OH! moment like me! I only discovered the timer on my ipod Touch after I had bought the kitchen timer…

The trick to keep the Time Eater stone dead after you killed it is to switch off your email and only check it a couple of times a day. Use the timer for this task, too.

All this will work wonders for your productivity. It did for mine. (Written in 10 minutes.)