Doing More with Less (Part 5)

The never-ending deluge of email creates stress for many of us.  Like many folks, I get a ton of email every day.  It is one of those parts of my job that I can’t control.  People can send two minutes writing an email with a few open-ended questions that could take 30 minutes to answer.  An accumulation of 25 emails might take me 1o minutes to process, or several hours.  That’s what I mean about not being able to control it.  But not being able to control it doesn’t mean that I can’t manage it.

Here are some steps that anyone can take to reduce the stress created by our email:

• Deal with each email in turn. I don’t know about you, but I have a tendency to take care of emails that I address quickly.  This shrinks the list and gives me the impression of productivity, but often leaves me with the more daunting ones that I tend to procrastinate with.  That results in a backlog of waiting emails, ones that I’m trying to avoid anyway.  Instead, as you go through each email, take one of the following actions:

1. Delete it. If no further action is required, then delete it.  Don’t leave it in your inbox.  Some of us want to do that in case we ever need to refer back to it at a later date, but most email software, such as Outlook or Entourage, keep a copy of anything you delete in a folder.
2. Delegate it. If the required action is someone else’s to take, forward the email.  Keep your remarks to the minimum needed.
3. Do it. If the required action is yours to take, determine if that action can be accomplished in two minutes or less.  If so, git ‘er done.
4. Put it into your @Action folder – If the required task is yours to take, but that task will take you more than two minutes, save it off in this folder to address later.  This is the folder that you will go through in your Weekly Review, which I discussed in a post earlier in the week.

• Put time in your schedule – Set up time to work your email, much as you would make time for any other important task.  Acting like we can absorb all that email management work is delusional.  And there’s something deep inside us that knows that we really can’t do that.  Instead, that part of us knows that we’re going to spend time tonight after we get the kids in bed trying to catch up.  I am setting up two times per day to check and process my email – once in the morning and another time before I head home.

• Turn off your notifier – All those great notifiers (on our Outlook or Entourage or iPhone) that tell us when we have new emails are terribly distracting.  They draw us away from whatever we were concentrating on.  I turned them off and leave all my email for my scheduled email times.  I felt immediate relief from the stress of the mounting pile.  What good does it do me to think and fret about the growing mound of emails that have come in?  All that doesn’t help me one bit.  It only gives me that familiar sinking feeling.  I didn’t need that, and neither do you.

• Limit your responses – There’s a school of thought that recommends that you limit your responses to no more than five sentences.  While I’m not a big fan of arbitrary rules or guidelines, I do think that most of us could be more concise and use less words in our email correspondence.  It also saves us precious time.

Don’t let your email run your life.  You can get your inbox down to zero, and you’ll experience less stress