It's Time to Stand Up to Your Email
Thanks to the avalanche of messages they receive every
day, many professionals and office workers say they suffer from email
overload.
It doesn't have to be that way. People feel "they are
complete slaves to email," says Julie Morgenstern, founder of Julie
Morgenstern Enterprises, a New York-based time-management consulting firm.
"They can't control their knee-jerk response to check and
it absolutely impairs their productivity," she says. One reason we let
email rule our time: It's often the easiest task. "People's workloads are
so intimidating now….You use email as an escape," Ms. Morgenstern says. "It
gives you a false sense of accomplishment." There are ways to handle the
overload.
Take Action
Many people check email but don't take the time to decide
what to do with it, says David Allen, chairman of David Allen Co., an Ojai,
0128Calif.-based productivity consulting firm.
"Most people's in-boxes are these numbing events," Mr.
Allen says. "They have all these different kinds of things that mean
different things in the same place."
One of Mr. Allen's tips: the two-minute rule. "Anything
you can finish in two minutes you should do right then."
For emails that need more time, one option is to file
those messages in folders — including "action" items, "waiting" items that
can be deleted once a temporary issue is complete, and "reference"
items.
"If your actionable things are set up separate from your
reference items, that's going to clean up your head and life a ton. If you
have different meanings inside of one pile, you go numb because your brain
can't sort it," Mr. Allen says.
Still, a better strategy is to push emails out of your
in-box and onto a tasks list, says Mr. Allen, referring to some email
programs' "tasks to do" option. Or, simply write the task down on your own
list.
Merlin Mann, San Francisco-based editor of 43Folders.com,
a site focusing on personal productivity, says the key is to "get really
good at deciding what the email means to you the second you open it." He
says "checking email and not doing anything about it is the worst
habit."
You Decide When
Another strategy to take control of your in-box: Turn off
"you have mail" alerts that interrupt you as you work. Instead, decide on a
regular schedule to check your in-box, whether it's once every 30 minutes
or three times a day.
"That creates a much more peaceful and productive work
environment," says Mike Song, a Guilford, Conn., productivity consultant,
and operator of HamsterRevolution.com.
"Turn off all notifications, and then when you do go to
email, go through every piece of email and figure out what it means to
you," Mr. Mann says.
If you allow your in-box to dictate your workday,
responding to messages immediately, it means "you are not in charge of your
own career, your own job," Ms. Morgenstern says. "Everyone else is
controlling you." Instead, "give yourself 30 minutes every couple of hours
to go through email — open, make the darned decision, delete or file it,
and move on."
Another idea, if your job allows it: Ignore your in-box
for the first hour every morning, instead focusing on an important project.
"Once you open the email there are a million and one interruptions," Ms.
Morgenstern adds. "It's very hard to settle your mind down and
concentrate."
Ignoring email for the first hour is not easy. "The first
day [clients] try this they actually don't get anything done. They're so
distracted with worry about ‘what's in my in-box?' " Ms. Morgenstern
says.
"By the third day they're able to focus and the
productivity spike is so dramatic...They don't have this big, undone
critical task weighing over their heads. It's behind them. That fuels their
energy and they get more done the rest of the day."
Reduce Email
Another way to avoid email overload: Receive fewer emails.
Unsubscribe from mail you don't need, and reduce the number of messages you
send. "Because of the boomerang effect of email, if you become more
judicious, you eventually get less and less email," Mr. Song says.
This includes clicking "reply all" less often. "Over 80%
of all professionals feel their colleagues overuse ‘reply to all,' " Mr.
Song says, based on research he's done at client companies.
Also, make messages and subject lines concise. That helps
the recipient decide how to act on the message and to find it quickly
later. "A poor quality or low quality message takes longer to read, longer
to comprehend," Mr. Song adds.
Use Available Tools
Email tools can automatically filter low-priority email to
folders you check less frequently, say, once a week. In some programs,
that's as easy as right-clicking on a message.
Also, "a lot of people don't know that you can drag a
message from the in-box over to the calendar," says Peggy Duncan, an
Atlanta productivity expert and operator of PeggyDuncan.com.
And, use templates or, in Microsoft Outlook, the
"signature" function, to easily insert often-typed messages. "I have all
kinds of signatures saved," Ms. Duncan says. "I have signatures on how to
start a business, signatures with directions to my office."
