Email Avalanche: Time to Fight Back

 

Email: these days you can’t live with it and you can’t live without it. Somewhere, buried under all that spam, lame jokes forwarded to you by people you barely know, and offers for various enhancement products there may still be important information that you need to conduct your business and manage your life. Still, the problem has gotten so bad that some experts now estimate that reading and responding to email consumes almost 50% of our busy work day. What can we do to stop the email madness?

Recently, I read of one company that has instituted a ban on company related email every Friday – no one within the company can send email to anyone else in the company on Fridays, and email to outside customers is held to an absolute minimum. The goal is to free up employees so they can have at least one full day each week to concentrate on all the other projects that get behind the rest of the week because everyone is busy sending and answering email. So far, the program is a resounding success. As a matter of fact, company executives are now thinking of also banning meetings on Fridays so that people can get even more work done!

I don’t suppose any of us really wants to go back to the "stone age" before email was a part of our lives, but if you don’t have a plan to manage your email it will end up managing you, like the tail wagging the dog. Here are some tips to help you avoid being swept away in the email avalanche.

1. Set your priorities and stick to them. The barrage of email that hits you every day covers a wide range of subjects and issues, ranging from the ridiculous to the urgent. You must have your priorities for the day firmly in focus, and resolve to only read and respond immediately to those messages that directly apply to your priorities for the day. Failure to do this will result in hours of wasted time that could be devoted to achieving your more important goals.

2. Set your Outlook program to open in Calendar mode instead of the Mail screen. Most of us use Microsoft Outlook to manage our email and schedules. When you start up your computer in the morning, set your Outlook preferences to open in Calendar mode. By doing this your attention will be drawn first to your priority activities and goals for the day, and have these things set firmly in your mind before you check your email. Most people check email first, and then they are swept away in a warren of bunny paths as they deal with and respond to whatever is in their Inbox.

3. Turn off the annoying chime alert that tells you when you have received new email. How often have you been involved in an important project, only to hear that Outlook "ding" which causes you to stop what you are doing and check your email? Now your chain of thought has been broken and, what is even worse, you can easily be drawn into dealing with the contents of the new message. You tell yourself it won’t take but a minute, but that represents a minute (get real– it could be minutes or hours) that is stolen from your top priorities.

4. Instead of listening for the "ding," designate a set time to check your email. You build appointments into your calendar for other important tasks, why not set standing appointments to check your email? Check it at 10 am and 2 pm, or whatever makes sense to you. The important thing is to designate regular intervals to check the email so that you don’t check it every minute!

5. Prioritize your response times. Even when you do start scheduling times to check your email, you may still be tempted to respond immediately to everything that comes in. Instead, screen your email based on the level of importance. Very few emails require and immediate response, but when you receive one that does, respond immediately. Otherwise, save everything else to respond to at a set time, maybe at the end of the day right before you head home. Also, you receive plenty of messages that don’t really require a response. They are either low priority or have no value. Don’t respond to messages that have no payback for you.

6. Take advantage of special Outlook features that allow you to automatically sort email by sender and topic. Just the act of opening, scanning and sorting email can waste valuable time. Familiarize yourself with the options Outlook has for automatically processing messages as they come in, so that when you open your Inbox you can quickly identify the importance of new messages based on the folder into which they were placed.

 

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October Time Management Tip of the Month – Create a Not to Do List!

We are all familiar with the value of creating a to do list to help set and manage our priorities. The traditional to do list is the foundation of most time management strategies. But what about a non-traditional list – a NOT to do list? We are taught to set important goals and stick to them, but isn’t also important to define what we won’t do? There is no way to complete our to dos until we define what we will avoid doing. This is called setting boundaries and it is what really makes time management work. If you are really going to get your important goals accomplished, you must be just as firm regarding what you can’t or won’t do as you are about what you intend to get done. From now on, put your "to dos" on one list and your "not to dos" on a separate list, and be very careful not to get those two lists mixed up.