subject: How To Manage Your Email And Increase Your Productivity By Up To 20% [print this page] Take back control Take back control
If youre reading this, then it can help you join the growing number of people who are taking back control of their productivity in the face of a major challenge - email. The overload of email is draining the productivity of our workforce. But the good news is there are ways to deal with this challenge, and theyre simple to apply. All they require is a willingness to learn and some practise.
This introductory report is designed to teach you some basic strategies which you can apply immediately to managing email to increase your productivity.
Were going to cover:
-The biggest, time wasting mistake that most people make with email and how to avoid it
-The four step process of how to deal with any email to save you time, energy and focus
These two simple strategies can dramatically improve your productivity. But to get maximum benefit they also require a certain mindset. You need to be constantly asking yourself:
How can I improve my results? How can I get more out of the day without stressing myself too much?
Dont let yourself get too overwhelmed by your environment. Its amazing to me how many people persist with energy draining, time wasting processes without trying to find an easier way.
To date, I and my colleagues have helped over four thousand people deal with this productivity issue, and the biggest benefit they feed back to us is a greater sense of control over their work.
This simple report on the challenge of email management is one step towards helping you achieve that.
A brief overview
Remember the good old days
Remember the time when people relied upon picking up the phone to discuss issues? When snail mail was relied upon to write to others?
Just two years ago, I was sitting in a meeting with one of the senior managers of Australia Post when he stated, If I could ban email from our office, I would. Now, he wasnt saying that because he saw email as being in competition with Australia Post (although I guess its possible). Rather, he was in despair that staff communication was suffering as people continually resorted to email to discuss issues and relay information.
Something is missing here
Like it or not, email is here to stay. Its doubling every six months, and if you dont learn to manage it effectively your productivity is going to plummet. Some people spend all day going through their emails.
But email has shown us something very interesting. It has highlighted a major weakness in our workforce many people lack the principles of time management and an ability to integrate those principles with technology.
Time management principles are terrific, but unless you can apply them to the tool youre working with (such as Microsoft Outlook, Lotus Notes, or a PDA) then the benefit is marginal.
In other words, our workforce is being dominated by technology rather then making it serve them. Remember how one of the major aims of technology was to save us time. And in some areas it has. But in the case of email what it has really done is make each individual a target for more information to be thrown at them twenty four seven.
The best part is that thanks to an increasingly litigious society, and a few notable corporations going bust, its becoming your responsibility to keep these emails just as you would financial records. That way, when the auditors come they have a clean trail to follow so they know who to blame.
In the wake of all these companies crashing, the USA has implemented tough legislation regarding the storage of email, voicemail and sms texts. That means that the information in a three year old email must be easily retrievable upon request. Australia is already facing the same issue.
So youre simply walking targets, and its your responsibility. Lets look at the specific strategies we can use to manage email effectively and increase our productivity by up to twenty percent.
Strategy number one:
Never, ever, ever, ever, ever store your emails in the inbox after you have
read them.
Imagine you get home from work and you go to the mail box. Lets say there are five letters the post man has dropped off for you (most of them are bills). You pull them out of the mail box and open them up.
As you read them, you quickly decide which letter to throw in the bin (not recommended with your bills, theyll just keep mailing you) and which ones you want to keep.
Lets say you throw two of them in the bin, and you have three letters remaining that you need to keep.
Now let me ask you a question.
Do you put those three letters back in the mail box?
Of course not! That would be silly. If you did that, you would have trouble finding them again. The post man wouldnt be able to fit tomorrows letters in the mail box, it wouldnt make sense.
Yet what do ninety five percent of people do after they read an email?
Answer: they leave it in the in-box. Theyll deal with it later. Now this is fine if you have about five emails in your inbox. But an email takes up only one line of text on your computer screen, which means it can build up very quickly. Before you know it, you have thirty, fifty, one hundred, two hundred emails sitting in your inbox. Just glancing at them gives you a headache.
The biggest inbox I ever saw!
The most Ive ever seen with a client is 12,000 emails sitting in their inbox. She was part of the finance team in the company, and she wanted to keep every email just in case she needed it.
Do you think she might waste time she doesnt need to just trying to find the emails?
What I want you to do is treat your inbox as if its your own personal receptionist. The receptionist greets all the visitors in the lobby, and then tells them where they need to go. They direct the traffic. But they dont want all the visitors staying in the lobby with them because it gets too crowded.
Its the same deal with your inbox. If you leave your emails in your inbox, what happens is it gets very crowded very quickly. You might be familiar with the message, You have no space, please delete files to make new space. Thats because you dont have a system of clearing your emails out regularly.
Beware of a big time waster
This brings us to one of the biggest time wasters related to email. What happens when you need to find that email again? Well, you start scrolling through your inbox (which by now is pretty full) looking for it. For some of you trying to find information is draining your time the most and can be very frustrating.
Also, have you noticed how many people dont know how to put a descriptive heading on their emails? So when youre trying to find it, the heading is often not a good indicator of what the actual email is about. All you have to go on is the rough date it was sent, and the name of the sender but it gets messy and its time wasting.
So by now youre probably asking, If I dont store emails in the inbox, then where do I put them?
Well, Im glad you asked. Now is the time to discuss a very powerful four step process
Strategy number two:
A simple process for managing emails as they come into your inbox
When an email comes in, theres one of four actions you can take with it. You can:
-deal with it straightaway
-put it in the bin
-give it to someone else
-get to it later
(By the way, whenever I ask my clients in a workshop what they can do with an email, they all give the same answer loud and clear - DELETE IT! Unfortunately, you cant always do that.)
Now, lets cover these in more detail:
Deal with the email straight away well, you already know how to do that one. If you have time, and you can do it, then thats great. Its done and you can get on with the next task.
Delete the email I suspect youre very well practised with this one. Youve checked it out, got what you need and now youre happy to trash it!
Give it to someone else now, if youre in the position of being able to do this, its very handy. The issue of tracking what you have delegated is a whole lesson in itself (and forms part of the performance management of your team). However, some of you dont have the authority to delegate to someone else.
Get to it later now this one is the real key. When you defer an email, youre putting it off until a later time. For most people, their way of doing this is to leave the email in the inbox but, as weve discussed, that can be ineffective.
In deferring an email, you have two issues to consider:
- When will you answer the email?
- Where will you store the email in the meantime?
Now, the two main software programs used in corporate Australia to receive email are Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes. You may use a different program, but what Im about to show you will work on most applications.
In these programs, you have the folder entitled:
Tasks or To Do List
Any email you receive that requires you to do something should be put in the tasks folder. When you do that, it also gives you a chance to nominate when you will do it.
*A little tip - when you enter the heading for the task, be as descriptive as possible so that you can know what its referring to at a glance.
So by transferring the email to the Tasks folder, the email will be taken out of the inbox and placed where it wont be forgotten.
This means:
-you dont need to waste time searching for the email in the inbox
-you dont need to remind yourself to take care of it
-you can even set the reminder bell on the task entry to remind you when to do it (dont do this for all of them or it will be ringing every two minutes)
-youre one step closer to an inbox that is almost empty
-you can even attach a priority on the task entry so you know in what order of importance you have to follow up on it
Emails you want to keep just in case you need them
Now, what about all those emails you want to keep just in case you need to access them again? Well, they can go straight to a subfolder just for storing information. In fact, if youre getting a lot of CC Mail, you can set up a CC Mail subfolder to automatically store them.
Then, when you next have a coffee break, you can go through the CC Mail to catch up on the information youve been sent. But truthfully, 85% of the emails we are ccd on require no action at all.
This applies to every email youre sent
From now on, every time you receive an email, instead of leaving it in the inbox, you can ask yourself:
Can I delete it?
Can I delegate it to someone else?
Can I deal with it now?
Can I get to it later by putting it in the tasks folder?
Email Protocol
Email is still very new for some of us, and were still figuring out the rules as we go along. One suggestion that will help your organization is to create a list of email protocols.
It can include areas like when not to send an email, how to address it, no use of capital letters since it comes across as shouting (dont assume anything when it comes to what people actually know about email protocol.
Most importantly, you put in place the expectations of what is appropriate for the usage of email and what is not.
These are areas that if adopted company wide will help the overall management of email for all the staff. This is critical for achieving a gain in your productivity across the whole organization (and its stakeholders).
Finally
Obviously, there are a whole lot more techniques you can use in managing your productivity with Outlook or Lotus Notes (or whatever email tool you use). That needs a whole workshop to cover. But hopefully you can see the benefit of applying this simple process to every email that is sent to you.
If you find yourself improving your management of email with any of these techniques (or you create your own) then by all means share your helpful hints with your colleagues. The more an office is effectively using email, the more productive it will be.
Lastly, if youre reading this and have any further queries or feedback, then feel free to send me an email (I know, its a good chance for me to practise what I preach). Id he happy to help with any queries you have, and Id love to hear whether this has been of any help.
