By James A. Baker
Time Management Training Institute
October 2009
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.
James A. Baker is the Founder and Chairman of Baker Communications. Baker
Communications is a sales training and development company specializing in
helping client companies increase their sales and management effectiveness. He
can be reached at 713-627-7700.
