Tip-Of-The-Month: How to manage the e-mail overload, part 4 of many

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Fearlessly facing the issues

E-mail messages, especially the not-so-easy ones, seem to sit in our inbox for a while before we finally take actions on them. We may agonize about them for days and looking at them dozens of times before we finally take the necessary action. By that time, it may be too late and we may find ourselves missing important windows of opportunities or critical deadlines and therefore needing to do some damage repair. Or even if it is not late, we still feel exhausted and guilty, having spent valuable mental and emotional energy without making much progress. 

You know these messages that I am referring to. Scan your inbox right now and identify 5 to 10 of these messages and let’s get to work:

1. If you need more information before you can handle the message (like more clarification on certain issues, or access to a report that has some relevant data), then initiate the request to get the necessary information. Put a reminder so that if you don’t get the information within the necessary timeframe, you can follow-up in a timely manner. Then move to the next message.
2. If you need time to think through the content of the message and/or preform the related task, then set time on your calendar to do so, and then move to the next message (most important treat this time like a serious appointment that is not easily subject to change. So when the time comes, just do it!).
3. If you need to consult with others before you can handle the message, then initiate the request to consult with the relevant people. Also, put that reminder so you can follow-up. Then move to the next message.
4. If you have the information you need, and don’t need more time to think it through or perform a related task, and don’t need advice from others, then prompt yourself to take the action now! If you have been postponing such a message, it is likely that what is stopping you is an underlying fear of facing the issues (making a decision, saying no to people, giving information or opinions that may rock the boat, etc.). So the solution is to fearlessly face the issues and learn in the process. Below is the 5 step process that can help you do so.

Fearlessly Facing The Issues: A Five Step Approach

• Step 1: Draft your “fearless” response (but don’t send it yet). In other words, how would you respond if you had no fear and if you were to face the issues to the best of your knowledge.
• Step 2: Write down what you are afraid of (specific thoughts that are causing your fear), and what are the likelihood that these unfortunate events will come true (jot this down, don’t just think it), and how you would manage them if they would come true.
• Step 3: Review your “fearless” response again and potentially refine it to minimize any associated risks. At this point you may already feel ready to face the issues and send your response. If not, go to step 4.
• Step 4: Get feedback about your response from someone else, and preferably someone objective who is not a stakeholder in the issues. Get some objective feedback on your analysis in step 2 above.
• Step 5: Refine your response and send it and stay tuned for more learning.

If you start fearlessly facing the e-mail issues on a daily basis (every time you go to your inbox), you are likely to dismantle these fears quickly and accelerate your e-mail process! 

Additional Resources

• Special Lunch & Learn Webinar: Empty Your E-mail Inbox--hands-on session (August 5)
• Managing and Organizing Your E-mail Inbox Workshop (August 12)

Tip-Of-The-Month: How to manage the e-mail overload, part 3 of many

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I need your involvement

Significantly reducing the output

Significantly reducing the input

Tip-Of-The-Month: How to manage the e-mail overload, part 2 of many

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Many of the business professionals we talk to seem to report that they spend endless hours in their e-mail inboxes. They tend to "live" there checking e-mail every few minutes or even seconds, having a dozen of e-mail messages open simultaneously, hopping from one to the next, and then deserting the latest one as soon as they hear the beep or see the alert, to open yet another message. Someone confessed recently at one of our workshops that when no new e-mails show up, he sometimes catches himself pressing the send/receive button repeatedly as if he is desperate for more. Does it sound like an addiction? Well, it is.

There is a lot more to discuss about this addiction, and this will be one of the topics we will touch on in future articles, but for now, we are going to focus on simplifying and optimizing the process--the e-mail management process that is. This is the second out of five strategies that I layout out in the last tip-of-the-month in which I also discussed the first strategy: "Using e-mail for what e-mail is best at."

The simplified e-mail process

Instead of "living" in the inbox and working on e-mail messages in an ad-hoc fashion, how about treating e-mail like any other task with a beginning and an end. We will discuss below how frequently we engage into this task, but for now, let us focus on the mechanics of this task. Let us also give this task a name: "Processing the Inbox." Processing the Inbox consists of the following:

• Going through the inbox one message at a time, starting with the most recent, and not leaving that message until we make a decision about it.
   
• If a message is urgent, we handle it right away.
   
• If a message is quick and easy, we hand it right away.
   
• If a message cannot be handled right away, for one reason or another, we make a decision about when we want or need to handle it and flag accordingly (or categorize it, or tag it, or label it, depending on which e-mail application you are using):
   
• If it has to be handled today, then flag it with a red flag
• It it can wait until tomorrow or later, then flag it with a blue flag
• If it can be delegated to someone else, then forward it to them, and flag it with a yellow flag

Processing the Inbox is not complete until you process all the new messages in the inbox (the messages that arrived since you checked the inbox last).

To see this process in action, view the free training module (see form in the left column) which demonstrates the step by step process (in this case for Microsoft Outlook 2003, even though the above process can be adapted to any version of Outlook or any other e-mail application that supports tagging or labeling such as Google Mail, and applications with add-on's that support tagging such as MailTags for Mac Mail).

The optimized e-mail process

Now that we have a process down, and we don't just do e-mail one at a time and endlessly, there is still an important questions to answer, and that is how often do we check e-mail? In other words, how do we optimize our workflow?

This brings us to the core issue that I have been evangelizing for years, and which I recently published in its most comprehensive form: The Results Curve--How to Manage Focused and Collaborative Time (free download available).  I won't discuss the details of the Results Curve here, but according to the Results Curve, it is best to check e-mail every 40 minutes, or whatever length of focused time you choose. So instead of checking e-mail every few minutes or few seconds or as soon as you hear the beep or see the alert, let e-mail wait until the next collaborative session.

This also means that at the end of the day, we need to leave room for an e-mail session, where we go through the messages we flagged for today, and handle these messages.

Before you answer your next e-mail, stop for a second and ask the question: Should I interrupt my current task and jeopardize my results, or should I wait until the next collaborative session?

Stay tuned for the next Tip-Of-The-Month article where I will discuss the next strategy: "Significantly reducing the output and the input."

Tip-Of-The-Month: How to manage the e-mail overload, part 1 of many

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In this series of articles, my goal is to tackle the issue of e-mail management from several angles. The e-mail overload problem is multi-faceted and not something that can be solved quickly. Most of us, bloggers and Twitterers are guilty of giving the impression that we can help our readers solve major problems by giving them the miraculous solution in a few paragraphs or even 140 characters. Let us stop this wishful thinking. Significant challenges require innovative solutions and persistent application of these solutions as well as ongoing learning and adjustment. This requires trial and error over a period of time until we find the winning formula.

If you are getting a large number of e-mails and feeling that e-mail is exhausting and out of control, I have some good news and some bad news for you. The bad news is that there is no immediate and easy solution (other than finding a new job and starting fresh, which is only a temporary solution). The good news is that there is a whole set of effective strategies that we can deploy to get the e-mail overload well managed. All together, these strategies are likely to bring us a significant relief and help us refocus our energy on the core issues and create more compelling results.

In the upcoming weeks and months, I will be writing a series of articles on this blog and elsewhere addressing at least five of these e-mail strategies and probably more. While many of these strategies are derived from the Accomplishing More With Less Methodology (see free e-book, workbook, and workshops), these articles will also include the latest findings from our ongoing research effort and will be part of the upcoming book on how to effectively manage your e-mail and Social Media activities. Hope you will join us in this effort and participate in the E-mail and Social Media 5-minute survey as well as post your comments on this blog.

The five e-mail strategies

Simply put, here are the five e-mail strategies:

1. Using e-mail for what e-mail is best at
2. Simplifying and optimizing the process
3. Significantly reducing the output and the input
4. Fearlessly facing the issues
5. Attacking the root causes

Let us start with the first strategy and stay tuned for more!

Using e-mail for what e-mail is best at

When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail:

Oh well! We have the hammer, and in this case it is called "e-mail." We have it and we tend to use it all the time. E-mail is easy. It is quick. It costs virtually nothing (if we are only looking at the hard costs). In addition, we can say whatever we want in an e-mail and not get interrupted by someone else's point of view (can be rewarding but dangerous). So no wonder why we are so quick to use it in almost any situation.

Blinded by the ease and speed of e-mail, among other factors, we tend to forget that e-mail is not the only tool for communicating. This is a list of some of the tools that can largely benefit us when used appropriately in conjunction with e-mail. What do you think these tools are ideal for and not so ideal for? Use this opportunity to jot down your answers and then compare with the answers below:

While there is not one answer, and no right or wrong answer, when it comes to how best to utilize these tools, here are some suggested answers as a starting point:

Let us add a few more asynchronous tools to the mix

• Blogs
• Wikis
• SharePoint
• Google Docs 

Blogs, wikis, Microsoft SharePoint, Google Docs, and other information and document sharing tools, can tremendously help take the load off of e-mail. One of the examples that I give in our workshops relate to how blogs for instance (in this case, we are referring to internal blogs) can help the knowledge experts within the team or organization answer important questions once instead of time after time, and make these answers accessible to everyone within the team or organization. E-mail is not the best way to leverage and share knowledge.

Let us start using e-mail for what e-mail is best at! Before you write your next e-mail, stop for a second and ask the question: Should this be an e-mail or not?

Stay tuned for the next Tip-Of-The-Month article where I will discuss the next strategy: "Simplifying and optimizing the process."

Tip-Of-The-Month: The "new new" inbox--Get ready for the opportunities & challenges

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A few days ago, I posted an article about the Old terminology, new terminology: "People connecting with other people." A related topic that I have been thinking about is the "old" inbox and the "new" inbox. However the more I thought about it, the more I realized that there is even a newer inbox: The Social Media Inbox. What do these inboxes mean and what are the implications of the advent of the Social Media Inbox? Keep on reading!

The old inbox

I still remember the days when the inbox meant internal e-mail only. I was in Southern California at a technology company with about 100 employees at the time and everyone had access to Microsoft Outlook and used it for internal e-mail and for scheduling internal meetings. The external world was not "visible" to internal employees. There was no Internet, if you can imagine. Only a few people had access to MCI and a few others to Compuserve. These privileged people were able to connect to the external world but still had to go through hoops to do it.

The new inbox

Then came the Internet and suddenly the "new" inbox was born. The new inbox is connected to the whole world. This brought amazing opportunities and also an unprecedented e-mail overload. Every person ended up with a handful of e-mail inboxes ranging from work, to personal, to "throw-away" ones just to keep unwanted messages out of the way. Soon after came the invasion of the mobile devices and e-mail on the go. Consolidating messages into one e-mail application and/or synchronizing between multiple applications and devices became necessities and many of us have done some degree of consolidation and synchronization along the way.

And now meet the "new new" inbox: The Social Media Inbox

Then Web 2.0 snuck upon us! Now we are all part of the creation process and part of the conversation. Like never before, we the people can share information, participate in conversations, and build our own social networks. We are in direct contact with the people who once were invisible. Suddenly we are no longer just in our e-mail inbox(es). We are now as often or even more often in our new and expanded inboxes: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, Yahoo Groups, Google Groups, YouTube channels, del.icio.us bookmarks, StumbleUpon articles, and you name it, which all together I am calling the Social Media Inbox.

This inbox is emerging as a powerful force and even the most authoritative search engines are re-inventing their search approach to include the Social Media Inbox.

So what does it all mean? What are opportunities and the challenges?

The Social Media Inbox brings some unique opportunities and some rather unique challenges as well. On the opportunities side:

• We are connected with 100's of millions of people and are able to have real time conversations with them
• We are learning what they are like and how they think (market research)
• We are discussing our brand and the value that we bring to the table (marketing)
• We are influencing their buying decisions (sales)
• We are exchanging ideas and building on each other's ideas (innovation)
• And the list continues!

On the challenges side:

• We are faced with more information overload than ever before
• We are constantly interrupting our core activities to keep up with what is going on in the world
• We are not necessary leveraging this new inbox to the extent that we could
• And the list continues!

What does your Social Media Inbox (SMI) look like and how are you managing it?

If you haven't yet expanded your definition of the "inbox" and explored the Social Media world, this is the time to do so. Some exciting opportunities are awaiting you. If you have, this is the time to reflect further on the opportunities and challenges and how they can be managed to help us be more effective in the workplace and beyond.

As we continue to explore this topic and explore best practices to manage the SMI, we need your help! Please share your thoughts below or fill out this short Social Media Inbox survey (5 to 10 minutes) and we will share the survey results with you.

Take the Social Media Inbox survey and become part of the conversation!

Tip-Of-The-Month: Managers, pay attention! Are you driving your team’s productivity down by constantly interrupting them?

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More often than not, when I ask our workshop participants why they get interrupted and why they are unable to stay focused on the task at hand, they say things like e-mail, Instant Messages (IM), phone, people stopping by, and the list goes on and on.

As we discuss this further, the role that their boss plays into these interruptions becomes more apparent, and many don't hesitate to air their frustration about this. Most participants report that it is their boss's e-mails, IM messages, phone calls, and surprise visits and requests that are one of the leading causes of their interruptions and inability to accomplish what they are expected to accomplish.

So I decided to write this e-mail to the bosses (following what Steve Krug did in his book Don't Make Me Think in which he wrote an e-mail to top management regarding website usability issues). Please forward this to your boss.

From: Pierre Khawand
to: <your boss>
Subject: How Managers "shoot themselves in the foot"!

Dear <your manager's name>,

As a productivity expert, I frequently discuss with my workshop participants and my readers, the role that interruptions play in diminishing our productivity and preventing us from getting our job done. One of the issues that come up often is that managers largely contribute to interrupting their staff and in a way are preventing them from delivering the same things that managers are eager to get delivered.

I decided to share my research, my thoughts, and my experiences relating to this topic with you as a manager. Having been in this role myself over the last two decades, I understand the demands that this role puts on us. On one hand we have to satisfy the needs of the people that we manage, and on the other hand, we need to satisfy the demands of top management, shareholders, and other stakeholders. This makes it difficult not to quickly react to the constantly changing environment and interrupt our staff with the hope of finding a solution to a problem or improving a certain situation.

Unfortunately these interruptions tend to disrupt progress on current tasks, reduce productivity considerably, and just as importantly impact the morale and create additional stress. Ultimately these interruptions deprive us as managers, and our workforce, from the results we desperately need. I would like to suggest three important measures that can be taken immediately to help manage the manager-induced-interruptions and minimize their impact:

1. Differentiate clearly between items that are truly urgent and items that are perceived urgent. Items that are truly urgent have specific, measurable, and significant consequences on the end results if not acted upon within minutes. Items that are perceived urgent are based more on opinions, reactions, and office politics and can wait for 30 minutes to an hour or until the designated staff member is finished with their focused work. Managers who start to make this distinction, find out that most of the items that appear urgent fall in the category of "perceived urgent" and only a few pass the test of being "truly urgent."
    
2. For items that are perceived to be urgent, shield your team from them. Instead of interrupting the team (via e-mail, IM, phone, or in person) and sacrificing the task they have at hand, make a note of these items on a special to-do list that you create for each team member. Then communicate this list at the next opportunity--the next time you have a conversation with them, the next one-on-one, or when they are not focused and able to communicate.
    
3. Allow your team to tell you when they are focused, and be willing to defer items until they are done with their focused work.  Make it "okay" to say "no" to you. In parallel, let them know how you would interrupt them when truly urgent issues come up-issues that cannot wait until they are done with their focused work.

Having such a discussion with your team will not only result in tangible business results, but will engage the team and greatly improve the team's morale.By the way, the above will also help you minimize your team's interruptions of your focused work, and also optimize your focused and collaborative/management effort.

To get the full appreciation of how significant is the negative impact of interruptions on your staff, I urge you to take a look at my findings and suggested solutions in The Results Curve^TM: How to Manage Focused and Collaborative Time (free eBook or video). I also welcome your comments on this blog post, and any additional thoughts or questions that you might have.

Regards,
Pierre Khawand
Productivity Evangelist