Time Management Expert, Event Speaker: Mark Lamendola
 

Time Tips: Email Time Reduction Tip#5

In this installment of our series about saving time with e-mail, we'll see how you save time by including the message you're replying to in the body of your reply. We'll also address a practice that allows you to further capitalize on the time thus saved.

These days, it's common to receive dozens of e-mails per day. A customer service rep or technical support person at a business might receive several hundred. My personal record is just a tad over 2400 in 24 hours.

Here's one scenario:

  • BillyBob: I need my widget replaced.
  • Mary Servicerep: What is the model number of your widget?

600 e-mails later:

  • BillyBob: ES400TX.
  • Mary Servicerep: I don't understand your message. What do you mean by ES400TX? Is this a replacement?

453 e-mails later:

BillyBob: Yes.

BillyBob made it impossible for Mary Servicerep to help him. First of all, he should have included his confirmation e-mail from his original order. Then, Mary Servicerep would have had all of the information she needed. Second, every one of her replies and every one of his replies had no context.

While BillyBob might be a casual e-mailer who gets half a dozen e-mails a week, Mary Servicerep gets hundreds per day. She's got to handle as many customer issues as she can in the time available to her. So, she's going to handle the easy ones first and delay helping people like BillyBob because of the sheer effort involved in doing so.

When you reply to an e-mail, always include the previous e-mail in the reply--and stack new "threads" on top of that. So, the oldest e-mails go at the bottom, not at the top. Why is this? So we don't have to page down or wade through old e-mails to get to the new ones. Many people do the opposite, and put their new e-mail on the bottom. This is incorrect, and leads to confusion.

To keep your replies in context, it's a good practice to:

  1. Copy the entire previous e-mail (not all the ones before it, just the one you are replying to) into the top of your e-mail reply.
  2. Break that into snippets, replying to each one individually.
  3. Set these off with carets.
  4. Note that you don't have to reply to every snippet.
  5. Separate snippets with a separator of your choice.
  6. Delete unneeded text. You don't need to replay the entire previous monologue--you need only to provide the context for your answers to it.

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Example

Original e-mail:
We need to close the Jones account today. I called Mort Jones about his lack of payment. He told me the check was in the mail, but he's been saying that for six months. The time we waste on him is taking away from our ability to pursue other clients.

Can you meet me for lunch, tomorrow? I want to discuss sending the Jones invoices to a collection firm. But I also have two bits of good news. The first involves my daughter--and my new grandbaby. The other involves a call I got from Anna Misconi. She wants us to present to her board in a couple of weeks. Could be big money!

 

Reply:

>We need to close the Jones account today.

Done.

===

>I called Mort Jones about his lack of payment.
 

I'll bet *that* was fruitful. :)
 

===
>He told me the check was in the mail... pursue other clients.

Agreed.

===

>Can you meet me for lunch, tomorrow?

What time? Where?

===

>...sending the Jones invoices to a collection firm.

George in accounting has one on retainer. We should let him handle this.

===

>new grandbaby.

Congratulations!  :)

===

>Anna Misconi.

Whoa! This is VERY exciting news!

===

>Could be big money!

You're not kidding. But keep in mind how much of a win this is for them. We need to make that point very clear.

Take care,

Fred

====

We need to close the Jones account today. I called Mort Jones about his lack of payment. He told me the check was in the mail, but he's been saying that for six months. The time we waste on him is taking away from our ability to pursue other clients.

Can you meet me for lunch, tomorrow? I want to discuss sending the Jones invoices to a collection firm. But I also have two bits of good news. The first involves my daughter--and my new grandbaby. The other involves a call I got from Anna Misconi. She wants us to present to her board in a couple of weeks. Could be big money!

*************************************************

Now, that example does seem to take up a lot of space. But do you see how easy it is for the recipient of the reply to follow each thread? No guesswork, no writing back for explanation, no guesses. It's all very clear.

And you may have noticed that many of the snippets were incomplete. They were enough to remind the reply recipient of the context. You do not need to reproduce every line of the original in your reply. But you should include the entire original below it.

Sending e-mail properly simply requires a little planning and consideration. Your goal is to make it easy for the other person to understand your message. By reducing confusion and heading off potentially huge problems, it can save you--and everyone else--quite a bit of time.

 

 
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.