Taming the Email Beast

One resource that leaders never have enough of is time.  Strong time management requires you to say no and set priorities, which is something most of us can continually improve.  One of the biggest time-wasters is email.

Don’t get me wrong:  Email has provided some helpful benefits.  It allows you to keep a record of your communications and allows you to send information to people without being concerned about whether they are available at that time.  But most people use email a little addictively, checking it constantly and allowing it to take time away from more important tasks.  We also use it a little delusionally, believing it’s possible to check email while being productive at other things, despite the neuroscience research that explodes the multi-tasking myth.  Smartphones have only magnified this phenomenon.

So how do we fix this?  How do we put email in its place and use it as a tool but not a driver of our work lives?  Here are some tips.  (Some of these come from a book called, appropriately enough, Never Check Email in the Morning by Julie Morgenstern, which I highly recommend). 

1. Like Ms. Morganstern says, don’t check email until at least an hour into your day.  I’ll give you a minute to pick yourself up off the floor.  Yes.  I said wait an hour to check your email.  Use that hour to do the most critical task of that day.  Spend a minute or two at the end of the previous day deciding what that will be and then do it.  You will start your day with an important accomplishment, regardless of what vortex of crazy ensues from that point forward.  If you work in an industry that has mission-critical emails first thing in the morning, such as orders that come in overnight and must be filled immediately, move that hour to immediately after you look at the critical emails.
2. Turn off your email and only read and answer emails during set times during the day.  Most people fear that they are missing out on something by doing this, but it’s important to begin seeing that email is not for urgent matters.  Try setting times – say, 10 am, 2 pm, and 4 pm – as email times.
3. Answer emails immediately if you can do it in 2 minutes or less.  Productivity expert David Allen recommends that emails that require more than two minutes should be delayed.  You can move it to the end of your designated email checking time or to another of those time slots later in the day.  Then you can power through the quickies and reserve time for your more thoughtful responses.
4. If you genuinely can’t turn off your email or need to baby-step your way into it, at least turn the email alert sound off.  It’s almost impossible to ignore and takes you out of the flow of whatever you are working on.
5. If an email string involves two or more replies, use the phone or in-person discussions to address the issue.  If you need a record of what was decided, send a quick summary email after you talk.
6. Set your outbox so that it delays sending by 5 minutes to help avoid those “Oops, I forgot to include this” follow up emails.  This will also help you avoid the dreaded “I really wish I hadn’t sent that” emails.
7. Train yourself and others.  Ask them to use the phone or in-person discussions if an email is more than two paragraphs.  Morganstern recommends that you should state right at the top or in the subject line what you want from the receiver – please review and advise, double-check, etc. -- especially if you simply must send a long email.   Help others understand that email is not instant message and anything urgent should be handled by phone, text, or in person.
8. Realign your priorities.  If you wear your “I leave every day at zero inbox” priority like a badge of honor, rethink this.  In most workplaces, there are much more important tasks to be done each day than responding to each and every email on the same day. 
9. Use the organization tools in your email solution.  Some allow you to set rules so that newsletters, blog updates, and “FYI” type emails will go to a file to be read later.  Set alerts to remind you to reply to an email by a certain date or time.

These are a few tips to get you started with keeping email in perspective, allowing it to serve you and not vice versa. 

What other tips have you found to be helpful in taming the email beast?

The Golden Hour

It’s that time of the semester again, when academic lives heat up, work is probably calling, and personal events like graduations, recitals, and parties ramp up as well.  Stormy weather is typical in the spring and I’ve always thought it was apropos, given the often chaotic schedules that many have this time of year.  Now is the time to be extra vigilant of your time and productivity.  So how do you cope? 

One strategy is to pay close attention to what you do during that first hour of your work day.  Emergency medicine says that the first hour (or so) after a trauma is the most important to intervene to prevent worsening injury or death.  This is known as the golden hour.  What I’m suggesting is you implement your own golden hour, not to prevent death (yikes), but to encourage productivity and success.

Julie Morgenstern wrote a book called Never Check Email in the Morning (a work-life management book I recommend) and, while refraining from email all morning is probably not possible for most of us, what is possible is to delay checking email for an hour after you get to work.  (If your work culture simply won’t accommodate that – and by that I mean you would get fired or be professionally damaged -- an alternative is to scan email for absolutely critical stuff, spend a few minutes responding, and then turn it off for an hour.) Now, wait…I hear my fellow email addicts crying and gnashing your teeth. Before you tear your clothes and run in to the street to protest this madness I’m recommending, hear me out.  Email is hardly ever the source of high level or crisis information that simply must be addressed first thing.  Those things usually come in the form of a call or a text.  Email is great at getting you off task and distracted from what is critical, so it’s important to not think of email as “instant messaging” that requires that kind of immediacy. 

So what do you with that hour?  There are many ideas. Here are the best:

1. Work on the one thing that is necessary -- not preferable…necessary --  that you do that day.  What task or project would have the most impact on your work or would advance your goals?  What activity needs to be done so that you feel you actually got something accomplished that day?  Work on that.  I frequently end my day thinking about the next day’s first hour.  I write that activity down on a Post-It placed on my computer keyboard so that I see it first thing.  To earn extra “organization goddess/guru” points, you can even assemble all the materials you need to do for your activity and have them ready to go in your “first hour” file.
2. Do the hardest thing first.  Need to have a difficult conversation with someone?  Hate to look over your budget spreadsheets?  Whatever it is, get it done right away, so that it won’t be weighing on you through the rest of the day.
3. Feel empowered.  Some recommend that you use at least a few minutes of that hour to get inspired, because that will drive you, and possibly insulate you from other stressors, for the rest of the day.  

Other factors to support this golden hour, according to Ilya Pozin,  are to eliminate distractions, to eliminate multi-tasking, and use the phone instead of emails when conversation is what’s needed.  (How do you know when a call is better?  When the email string comes back twice or more.)

Then, after your golden hour has passed and you’ve completed or made progress on your task, open your door, turn on email, and let the day come in!

Have you used this strategy?  How did it go?  What other recommendations for maximizing this time do you have?