Ending the tyranny of e-mail
About a month ago with things really picking up at work I started to question, more than usual, how I was spending my time. In the evenings I spent some time reading up on productivity tweaks and after giving serious thought to how I was actually spending my days I decided to make some changes at work. There are few things I'm doing differently but the biggest one seems to be how I've changed how I handle e-mail.
In the past I'd been your typical email user at work. I'd have Outlook, or whatever mail client I happened to be using at the time, open all day. I was reading most everything as it came in, responding as necessary and keeping the past three months or so of email in my inbox. When looking at my personal productivity I realized I was wasting a bunch of time on email, maybe an hour a day. I'd also become very interrupt driven, I'd go off task to answer and email and then finding myself struggling to get back on task. So I've adopted an email management strategy that is saving me a ton of time. The rules of the new road go something like this:
The email client is opened and closed like any other application. It only gets fired up 3-4 times a day when its time to do email. Period. I only open it when its time to work on email and close it as soon as I'm done. Email is supposed to be asynchronous not real-time. Surprisingly no one has seemed to noticed that I'm not always responding immediately.
My inbox is empty. Yes you read that right, its empty!
All email is dealt with immediately, in one session, when I'm done the inbox is empty again. The goal is to spend 5 to 10 minutes tops and Outlook is closed again.
If its trash or something I just need to read once I read it and delete it immediately. If the email contains potentially useful information I will file it away into an archive folder. If I can respond to the message in just a couple seconds I respond immediately and file the email away. If the email can't be responded to immediately and/or contains action items for me I file it in an Action Items folder.
This strategy is saving me alot of time. I stay on-task more with my regular work and when I do work on email I fire through everything much quicker. Seperating out email like I would any other task is a great productivity enhanced, I really wish I'd taken this approach sooner.
In the past I'd been your typical email user at work. I'd have Outlook, or whatever mail client I happened to be using at the time, open all day. I was reading most everything as it came in, responding as necessary and keeping the past three months or so of email in my inbox. When looking at my personal productivity I realized I was wasting a bunch of time on email, maybe an hour a day. I'd also become very interrupt driven, I'd go off task to answer and email and then finding myself struggling to get back on task. So I've adopted an email management strategy that is saving me a ton of time. The rules of the new road go something like this:
The email client is opened and closed like any other application. It only gets fired up 3-4 times a day when its time to do email. Period. I only open it when its time to work on email and close it as soon as I'm done. Email is supposed to be asynchronous not real-time. Surprisingly no one has seemed to noticed that I'm not always responding immediately.
My inbox is empty. Yes you read that right, its empty!
All email is dealt with immediately, in one session, when I'm done the inbox is empty again. The goal is to spend 5 to 10 minutes tops and Outlook is closed again.
If its trash or something I just need to read once I read it and delete it immediately. If the email contains potentially useful information I will file it away into an archive folder. If I can respond to the message in just a couple seconds I respond immediately and file the email away. If the email can't be responded to immediately and/or contains action items for me I file it in an Action Items folder.
This strategy is saving me alot of time. I stay on-task more with my regular work and when I do work on email I fire through everything much quicker. Seperating out email like I would any other task is a great productivity enhanced, I really wish I'd taken this approach sooner.
posted by David at
12:33 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home