Manage Your Mailbox

Emails can be a great time waster and provide a constant source of distraction throughout the day. It’s a constant theme when I’m talking to clients and often one of the first habits that they need to change.

How often have you found that you start checking your emails and as you work your way through them, you find yourself taken off in any number of different directions as you respond to an email, follow a link to read a report, check some information on the internet, pick the phone to make a call, get reminded of something and go off to do that before coming back to your email.

If you're going to make the most of your day then one way to increase your productivity is to manage the amount of time you spend on emails. Keep this to a minimum. At least minimise the time you spend ‘checking’. Only check two or three times a day and this is just to review what’s come in and decide what action you need to take. Read, Action, Dump, File - much the same as with paperwork. A quick scan will tell you what’s important and what’s not, what needs a response now and what can be dealt with (read or responded to) later. Set aside time specifically to deal with emails. Set a time limit and stick to it.

And if you haven’t already switched off those automatic alerts, do it NOW.

Switch Off

Away this weekend and I left the technology behind for a whole four days. I even survived without the mobile phone for much of it – only using it to contact fellow travellers and make arrangements and once to send a twitter message from the top of a hill, when we took a break in the sunshine.

I did of course come back to a full inbox of emails – mostly junk but quickly dispatched. I’ve never had email on the move, from choice more than limited technology or capability. While it might be useful at times – there is rarely anything that’s so urgent that it won’t wait until I return to the office and clients rarely want or need to contact me out of hours and if they did the phone is a quicker and more reliable means of contact.

I know some people can’t survive without constantly being in touch or being able to send and receive emails at any time of the day and night but there are always other things I can be doing when I have spare time on the move rather than checking emails. I even leave my mobile phone behind or switched off at times and I purposely don’t have all the whizz-bang, bluetooth headset, hands-free, technology. In that respect I’m probably technologically backward but actually, I want to decide what to do when, not have technology deciding for me.

Now the demands of my work are probably different from yours but how attached are you to your technology? Are you really in control of your time and the technology or is it controlling you? While it’s there to make life easier, if can also make it more demanding. Do you find it hard to switch off in case you miss something? How much of a difference will it really make to be instantly contactable?

Think about the technology you use and the way that you use it - could you use it less, have more time for yourself without reducing your productivity?

Information Overload

With so much information bombarding us from all directions we can’t possibly give our attention to everything that goes on around us but we feel that we may be missing out if we don’t, therefore we join every new group, we sign up to every social networking site going and we register for every newsletter, magazine and free piece of information that’s out there in case we miss out on some golden nugget of information that’s going to make a huge difference to our life.

I don’t know how many newsletters I’ve subscribed to over time but it’s a lot – now I know which one’s I like, which one’s I find useful and which one’s suit my style of working. There’s nothing wrong in unsubscribing from those you don’t either have time to read, or no longer find useful. We also have blogs, in fact there are hundreds, thousands out there – all of which you could end up subscribing to.

But when are we going to find time to take in all this additional information, read all these newsletters, blogs, contribute to all the discussion groups, attend all the network meetings? Don’t even attempt to. Fit what you can into the time you have available without pushing more important tasks to one side. Choose the ones that matter, one’s that are interesting and useful and don’t worry about the rest.

Remember Pareto’s principle … 80% of the information you need is contained in only 20% of what’s in your inbox!

Holiday Emails

It’s coming round to that time of year again, so I thought it was worth putting this up to help you deal with all those post holiday emails.

If you rely on email as part of your business, you probably dread coming back from holiday to hundreds of emails. The thought of spending the first week dealing with them all, so here are a few ideas to help you deal with the backlog.

First off – move ALL the unread emails into a Holiday Email Folder. That way you can clear your Inbox and quickly scan and deal with all the new emails as they come in.

Once you've planned out the important things you need to get done on your first day back, set aside an hour to go through your Holiday Email folder. Do your priority task first then deal with your email.

First scan - DON'T READ OR RESPOND TO ANY EMAILS ON THIS SCAN. Just go through quickly and eliminate the spam and any email you know you don't need to read. Use the sort function to sort your email by sender or subject, which makes it easier to delete the junk. This should take only a few minutes.

Second scan - pick out all the priority emails you need to respond to first and flag them or place them in a separate 'Action' folder.

Set aside time to respond to your 'Action' emails – start doing this now, as you should still have plenty of time left. Go through and respond to the emails, which only need a quick two-minute response. Leave emails requiring a longer response or more thought until later in the day when you’re next planned to deal with them.

Allow yourself a few minutes to take a quick look at any new emails - in case there is anything important that needs attention, but I mean a 'few minutes'. Don't get distracted!

If you’ve still got time in the hour do the third scan - if your filters haven't already sorted out Reading emails, now is the time to place all of these in the appropriate folder(s). Remember you don’t have time to read everything and the world won’t end just because you haven’t read this week’s/month’s newsletter. Now, might also be the time to unsubscribe to those you never get round to reading anyway.

Fourth scan - deal with what's left. Less urgent action emails can now be dealt with. Anything still left? If it's not action or reading - it's probably not urgent so can be deleted.

Once you've safely dealt with the backlog that came in while you were away, then you can apply the same process to the new emails that have come in.

Managing Your Email Distractions

I ran a workshop last week and one of the topics that came up during our talk on distractions, was managing your email and email etiquette. Emails can be a great time waster and provide a constant distraction throughout the day. If you're going to make the most of your day then one way to increase your productivity is to limit the amount of time you spend on emails.

One of the first things to do is make sure you’re setting both yours and your client’s/customer’s expectations. How quickly do you really need to respond to emails? Does your work require you respond immediately or can you wait a few hours or maybe even a couple of days? If necessary, set an autoresponder so that people who email you will automatically be notified that you’ve received their email and you will get back to them within a specified time.

Set aside time in your day to read and respond to emails. A quick scan will identify the important, urgent, reading and junk. Set a time limit, say 30 minutes at a time to go through and respond to emails that need a quick, instant response. Clear the rest of the action emails in the remaining time, without addressing any new emails. Leave those until next time, along with emails that require a longer response.

Filters are very useful for pre-sorting emails into different folders, so you can quickly see what’s important or filter out reading and newsletters.

Only send an email to the person who actually needs to read it and make sure that if you need it actioning you’re clear about what needs to be done and when – don’t leave assumptions open to mis-interpretation. Don’t ‘cc’ every person you can think of, only include people that need to read the email.

Email is not 100% guaranteed to get where it’s going. Especially with spam filters getting more and more efficient/aggressive/ selective you can’t be sure that your email has been delivered. There can also be a time delay in hitting send and it turning up in the recipient’s inbox. Due to vagaries of mail servers and technology and email may take a few hours to get to it’s destination. If it’s urgent – pick up the phone.

Oh and switch off that email alert.