Jeremiah at Web Strategist blogged about the how e-mail is consuming us in today’s business culture. Often, a lot of employees in almost any sized organization, are bogged down doing e-mail instead of getting work done. There is some hope — some technical solutions and some process improvements.
How do you behave with e-mail? If you’re like me, you try to respond quickly when it comes in, but that aside, what if you’re behind in e-mail, say on Monday morning? Psychologically, you feel overloaded, overworked and possibly depressed if you have a rather full Inbox. I understand, I’ve been there.
E-mail is a lot like rush hour traffic. Traffic only moves as fast as the slowest person. If you’re a slacker who does e-mail as the last task of the day, then you are aggravating your employees, your customers and partners. People have a need to communicate, and like humans, we want it now. Having that said, the fastest person in traffic isn’t always the quickest.
You have you put your foot down.
Understand that only you control how much e-mail you need to respond to. Only you can draw the line in the virtual sand that demarcs when you check e-mail. Watching your inbox isn’t productive. Don’t let e-mail rule you, you need to manage it just like an unproductive employee.
I have two solutions/tips for those who receive large quantities of important mail:
- Work Smarter, Not Harder: You don’t need to watch your Inbox. Check it at intervals. I suggest three to four times daily. Don’t check e-mail unless you are able to dedicate a half-hour segment to break through it like Chuck Norris. Prioritize necessary e-mails, throw spam into your appropriate Junk/Spam folder. Whatever you do, don’t open Linkbait.
- Learn when to take e-mail “offline” into a face-to-face meeting, phone call or Instant Message, if available.
- Reply All is the enemy. Don’t do it unless it’s absolutely vital.
- If an e-mail has you as the CC or BCC, it probably isn’t all that important.
- Use the Important/Urgency method to determine when you should respond to e-mails.
- Upgrade Your Tools: Before I completely bash Outlook, I want to credit Microsoft for making Scheduling and Delegation incredibly user friendly. Beyond that, Outlook Mail is a time-suck because it cognitively forces you to read mail previews, and mail forwards are attached, not in-line. This is especially troubling for those who need to read forwarded e-mail. Use Mozilla Thunderbird. Thunderbird is to e-mail like Johnny Depp is to Pirates of the Caribbean. You can configure mail filters, Tagging (for color coding efficiency), and it fetches e-mail much more reliably than Outlook.
I have some credibility in my advice. I used to receive about 4000 e-mails a month [during my time at AOL], of which most of them were usually time-sensitive. I used to spend a solid 4-hours daily doing e-mail. After making these simple changes, I reclaimed more than two hours daily and was even more productive.
What are your e-mail tips? Share them in the comments!
Budgeting email time is critical. Put it on your schedule and stick to it- when it’s admin time, you need to pull away and take care of email. And when it isn’t admin time, don’t even open the client, which means when that block is over, save whichever one you’re working on as a draft and close the client. It’s easy to nickel and dime yourself out of a lot of time by “just responding to one more email.” This goes double if you have employees of your own- when they’re in their email, they’re not doing whatever it is you’re paying them to do.
As a corollary, leave work at work. Your time off is for spending with your loved ones, exercising, relaxing, or any of a thousand other things- the email will be there when it’s time to go back to work. Work-life balance is a key to a good life, when the balance is thrown off, there are a lot of negative effects on you that can cumulatively cause big problems, like hypertension, obesity, and mental health issues. When you’re on your deathbed, you might look back and say you wished you spent more time with your kids; but you certainly won’t say you wished you had spent more time checking your work email from home.
When you write email, be professional but also be genuine, succinct, and direct. Put away that dictionary of business English. Leave out bullshit buzzwords, jargon, and passive voice- you might think it makes you seem intelligent but your coworkers will think you’re a douchebag. Keep it polite, concise, and to the point.
Double-checking the address you’re sending it to takes a fraction of a second and prevents embarrassing mishaps. That half-second could keep you out of HR, or it could keep you your job.
If you wouldn’t say it to your grandma, don’t write it in an email. Unless you’re talking about my grandma, in which case ask yourself what she would say and then say the exact opposite; that should keep you out of HR.
Junkyard Willie
April 4th, 2008
Very good advice, JW!
How do you generally approach someone on their bad e-mail habits? Any suggestions?
~J
Joe
April 4th, 2008
Nice post. I linked to it from my blog covering hi-tech addictions, etc.
S.P. Gass
April 6th, 2008
Actually, I scheduled the post to appear tomorrow evening (Apr 7th).
S.P. Gass
April 6th, 2008
Personally to effectively cope with the incoming streams of information I’m using my summarization application. At a click of a button I get to see the essential keywords and the most important sentences. Over period of time I found that looking at the instant information capsules gives me quite useful insight and saves me a lot of time. If you would like to try out summarization this is the product link: Context Organizer from Context Discovery Inc
Henry Lewkowicz
April 7th, 2008