Time Management Expert, Event Speaker: Mark Lamendola
 

Time Tips: Email Time Reduction Tip#2

When I give my time management seminars, people always ask about e-mail. It seems most folks feel overwhelmed by their e-mail systems. They tend to blame spam, but that is not a core problem. In fact, the whole spam thing is is grossly exaggerated.

There are two core problems with e-mail:

  • Captivity.
  • Poor etiquette (we'll discuss this in future eNLs--it's a huge sinkhole for time).

What is e-mail captivity? It's analogous to phone captivity. Have you ever been in a conversation, when the other person suddenly whips out a cell phone and answers it? As though you aren't there? Sure, this is rude. But it's also inefficient.

During the day, how often are you answering e-mail? That is, how badly are you fragmenting your schedule, how poorly are you concentrating, how much are you diverting your attention away from priority items?

Back in the days when movies and books first started showing characters using e-mail, the writers of these stories adopted an odd model: AOL. Anyone who's not a newbie knows AOL provides an awful online experience and it's so expensive as to fall into the "rip off" category. AOL did bring a large number of people into the online community via aggressive promotion. But an AOL user who tries any alternative to AOL instantly wants to switch. So it was weird for most of us to see the AOL-based way characters were accessing e-mail. One of the "features" was a voice announcing, "You've got mail." That cute but annoying "feature" has inculcated people with the notion that they have to answer e-mail as soon as it arrives. That, like the phone call taking notion, is untrue.

Schedule times for handling e-mail, and/or answer it between other activities. Don't interrupt or delay other activities just so you avoid unanswered e-mail in your inbox. I get hundreds of e-mails a day, and do not feel overwhelmed by them. Nor do I feel any need to answer them right away. I pretty much empty my inbox every day, so I do handle incoming e-mail rather than let it pile up. I just don't feel compelled to answer it as soon as it comes in.

One way I keep my inbox uncluttered is I place low priority items into one of two folders: ToDo and DelayRead. I do this manually. I do not use (or trust) automated filing of incoming e-mail, except for the junkmail function.

Your incoming e-mail will require one of these actions:

  • Answer soon. Example: someone sends you a question that's fairly time sensitive.
  • Answer later. I file these in a folder where I tend to them as time permits.
  • Delete without reading. You can do this with most incoming e-mails, if you use the preview pane. I also find using Outlook's built-in junk mail filter to be quite helpful.
  • File. I have an extensive filing system, patterned after the paper filing model. It's easy for me to find anything quickly.

My e-mail doesn't pile up or overwhelm me, because I separate the important from the urgent from the unimportant. I feel no need to answer it instantly.

From the above, you already know my opinion of Instant Messaging. If you want to be inefficient and insane, then IM to your heart's content. If you want efficiency and sanity, don't do IM.
 
A great way many businesses are managing time is using software. There are many forms of time and attendance software which allows managers to track and monitor employees time usage.
 

More thoughts on time management

The phrase "time management" is an unfortunate language quirk. You can't really manage time. It just is. You can't gain time, create time, or even lose time. Time is what it is, regardless of what we do.

It would be better to say "time allocation" or "activity management" "time usage" or some other phraseology to indicate that it's not time itself you're managing but how you use the time that exists. But we'll use the common terminology here to avoid confusion.

Some things time management is not:

  • Being more efficient. Suppose you become very efficient at making buggy whips. Does this fact mean you are managing your time well?
  • Getting more done in a given amount of time. Getting more done of what? And to what degree of quality? If you rake the leaves on a lawn from one side to the other all day long, does that mean you are a good time manager?
  • Being able to juggle multiple priorities. Instead of juggling priorities, assign priorities. First tend to the urgent things, then the most important things.
  • Mastering multi-tasking. This concept conflicts with what we know about the human brain. If you buy into this self-defeating, time-wasting, quality-killing ideology, you might also be interested in practicing solo flight by flapping your arms frantically.
  • Working faster. No, this mode is how you make mistakes that you subsequently have to spend more time fixing.

Some things good time management involves:

  • Deciding what to do. This is trickier than it sounds. Which is why there are time management experts.
  • Deciding what not to do. This is even trickier than deciding what to do. Which is why there are time managers and why discipline is a huge, huge factor in accomplishing this.
  • Deciding what to do when, and in what order. In essence, prioritization.
  • Determining the scope, goals, and metrics for each activity you undertake. In this area, we the find most room for improvement. Precision here allows you to avoid waste on the one hand, and falling short on the other.
  • Planning out the work, task, project, or activity such that you determine the necessary steps to quality completion. That is, what must you do to meet the intended goal and quality metrics?
  • Identifying unnecessary steps. Get this right, and you can cut your wasted hours significantly.
  • Figuring out what resources to use. Not all resources applicable to a task are equal. Picking the right tool for the job saves time, improves quality, and makes life less stressful.

We've highlighted only some of the factors involved in good time management. We actually teach extreme time management, which is a methodology that allows you to make effective use of your time almost second nature. You don't need a complicated system. Our system puts many of the variables on autopilot, so you have more time to do what you need to do. Our system goes way beyond most other systems in results, yet is far simpler.

Contact us for a presentation to your organization: comments @ mindconnection.com (remove the spaces after pasting into your e-mail client's "to" box.