How many times have you checked your email today? Did you start on the train or did your inbox get its first of many visits as soon as you settled at your desk? Are you checking it right now?
Email is quietly taking over our lives, and many of us don’t even notice. If pressed, we couldn’t give an accurate average of how many minutes we spend on email in any 24-hour period. This is largely because email gives us the illusion of productivity, often without delivering.
Productive emails require real responses, whether through action or decision, or both. But if you’re wading through 100 “productive” emails a day, you’re almost certainly spending more time on that grand feat than on executing actions and decisions – the work you’re actually paid to do.
In the Harvard Business School title Working Knowledge for Business Leaders, Stever Robbins suggests that we try multiplying the time we spend looking at our inboxes by our per-minute wage to calculate just how much money we’re wasting on email. He writes: "If you can justify that expense, far out – you're one of the lucky ones. But for many, incoming email is a money suck."
Email is becoming an expensive problem, whether you’re a small business, a corporate giant, an in-house worker or a virtual assistant. It’s time we tamed the beast.
Resist your inbox
In many ways, we are victims of our own availability. Your colleagues can commit their thoughts to text in moments and voila, you’ve got mail. But, although email is instant, it is not always urgent. Email is designed to enable you to read and answer messages later.
The automatic “refresh” setting on your email client is adept at telling you otherwise. The beep on your smartphone annoyingly demands that you prioritise every incoming message in a way that just isn’t necessary.
Resist the urge to obsessively check your email by turning these notifications off. Dedicate specific times of day to dealing with email.
Stop being part of the problem
We fritter away a lot of our time trying to work out what the emails we receive require us to do. Sometimes this might mean re-reading five or six emails to understand the point of one newly received message.
Other times, it’s a matter of sorting our way through emails we have been cc’d or bcc’d into, but which are irrelevant to us.
To start climbing your way out from under the avalanche, lead by example. Think about what would clarify the emails you receive and therefore save you time. This starts with the “To” field.
When tempted to cc and bcc other recipients in, ask yourself: “Do all of these people need this email? Why? How do I want them to respond? Would a separate email be more effective?” On this note, the less you hit reply-all, the fewer recipients there will be to include you in a follow-up reply-all.
You could even try making an agreement with your colleagues that you’re going to challenge each other to keep messages relevant. Give each other the freedom to reply “Relevant?” if something’s not, and agree that you will only deal with emails you are cc’d into when you have extra time.
Also consider what you put in the subject line. Try summarising instead of describing and change the subject if the email’s focus has changed mid-chain. “Notes from last Thursday’s presentation” makes the email’s priority obvious, rather than the vague subject line “Last Thursday”.
Write down what you need to do
It may feel odd when you’re accustomed to doing everything on-screen, but take notes on paper about what you need to do in response to various emails. You should do this during one of your designated email times.
This is an important step towards using email for communication rather than treating your inbox as a to-do list. If you’re manically sifting through your inbox to find a deadline mentioned three days ago, you’re wasting time that could be spent on completing the task.
To make the response list even more efficient, work by the “read once” rule advocated by Dave Fleet, VP of Digital at Edelman’s Toronto office. On his blog, he advises readers to read each email once and either deal with it straight away, schedule it for later action, delegate it, file it to read when you have time, archive it for reference or delete it.
When your response list is written, close your inbox and start checking your way through the list.
Send less email
Walking over to talk allows you to take advantage of being in an office and often gets the task done quicker. A phone call should be your next option.
>If you dare, ignore email. Let people to follow up with a phone call instead. You needn’t be an inbox slave.
