And here we go again! This week (part 3) I would like to suggest you quit e-mail when e-mail is not best suited for what you are trying to communicate and use the most suitable tool!

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

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?

Additional Resources

• MG Siegler from TechCrunch quits e-mail for a month! I will show you how you can quit e-mail too (part 1) and part 2.

• The Accomplishing More With Less Workbook

• The Inbox Freedom Workshop

Guest blog article written by Steve Loosley, Tech Blogger

Three weeks and 20 million users — Google Plus is everywhere, from the headlines of the New York Times to the millions of “walls” on Facebook. What is Google+, or G+ as it’s commonly called?

What does Google Plus mean for +You?

Google claims, “The Google+ project makes sharing on the web more like sharing in the real world.” Even though Google+, Facebook, and Twitter are often used in the same sentence, Google is carefully positioning G+ as a platform for sharing information, as opposed to another social media site.

G+ is designed around the metaphor of a circle.

All of us have “circles” of friends, circles with our family, close friends, classmates, colleagues, associates, customers, clients, and so forth. Moreover, we share different things with different circles. We tell our parents one thing, our close friends another, and our business associates still another.

G+ enables us to share different things with different groups or circles of people electronically, just as we do “off-line” in everyday life. We can share stuff with one person, with a group of people, or with anyone and everyone, the public. Stuff can be most anything, notes, pictures, videos, web pages — virtually anything.

In the following series of posts, we will show +You how to put Google+ to work, including how to sign-up for G+, set-up your profile, arrange your circles, and share information. In our next post, we will help you join and set-up your account.

Additional Resources

Google+ Project Website

Accomplishing More With Social Media Webinar Series: 9/19, 9/26 (12:00 to 1:30 pm Pacific Time)

LinkedIn for Sales Professionals! Webinar: 8/5 and 10/14 (9:30 am to 11:00 am Pacific Time)

Last week I described to you how MG Siegler from TechCrunch quit e-mail and I demonstrated how you can do that too and take control of your life again. I examined how results change with time, and how interruptions--like e-mail interruptions, can significantly reduce our productivity. Then I showed you how working in bursts of focused and collaborative sessions to create e-mail free zones (green bar below) and e-mail dedicated zones (red bar) is the answer:

Today, I would like to take this "quit e-mail" concept a step further.

To do so, I would like to bring to the picture the 80/20 rule! This rule states that 80% of our results come from 20% of our effort. In other words, there are some activities that we do that are closely connected to the desired results (the 20%) while many other things that we do that are marginally connected to the desired results if at all (the 80%):

The rule has many implications and applications, but for now, I would like to apply it to e-mail and propose that only 20%  of our e-mails are closely connected to the desired results while 80% are not.

So instead of quitting e-mail all together, how about we quit the 80% and focus on the 20%. I am not just referring to incoming e-mails, but I am also suggesting you start sending about 20% of the e-mails you send today. As a result:

1. People start to send you less e-mails and their e-mails are likely to be focused on the important issues.

2. People start to reach you using more appropriate tools instead of always e-mailing you.

3. You spend a lot less time on e-mail and more time on important endeavors.

Additional Resources

• MG Siegler from TechCrunch quits e-mail for a month! I will show you how you can quit e-mail too (part 1)

• The Accomplishing More With Less Workbook

• The Inbox Freedom Workshop

MG Siegler, from TechCrunch, tweeted and blogged recently "What if I just stop responding to e-mail?" The tweet soon became reality. MG decided to stop responding to e-mail for a whole month as an experiment. His frustration with the high volume of e-mail, and the feeling that e-mail has taken over, led to this experiment--which I believe is still in progress.

MG is not alone in his frustration! This frustration is shared by the majority of the thousands of business professionals that we work with. Our survey showed that on the average, the 1000 survey respondents spend 3.27 hours per day on e-mail. One of our workshop participants described it as "e-mail jail."

While MG's boss at TechCrunch may find that MG quitting e-mail is "interesting" and can lead to potentially great content for TechCrunch, you and I may suffer different consequences. Our bosses and clients may just fire us!

However, don't go to despair just yet! I am going to show you how you can quit e-mail too. This is like quitting e-mail for the rest of us.

You can quit e-mail too and let me show you how

Let us start by examining how our results change with time when we are working on a task. when we start to work on a task, we start to produce results, and then as we continue to work on that task, we produce more results. This continues until eventually the flow of results begins to level off and start to diminish:

What happens in reality though is that after we spend a few minutes on a task, we get interrupted, and our results go down to zero. This happens again and again so that our actual results rarely if ever reach the results curve shown above. Instead, we live in this low-productivity constant-interruption state depicted in the shaded areas below:

To remedy this situation, we need to stay focused long enough, before we switch tasks. How long is long enough? This depends on the task and it is a moment by moment decision we need to make depending on the task that we are undertaking next. If the task is strategic and important, my recommendation would be 40 minutes. Then switch and be collaborative. The results curve then looks like this:

All you have to do: Quit e-mail for 40 minutes

So if you don't have the luxury of quitting e-mail for a whole month, how about something much more attainable and sustainable, and more revolutionary in its impact on your productivity. All you have to do is quit e-mail for 40 minutes at a time, in other words creating e-mail free zones (shown in green below), and then handling e-mail right when you get into the collaboration zone, creating e-mail-dedicated zones (shown in red below).

Let us not "throw out the baby with the bath water." Let us take control by creating these e-mail free-zones and e-mail dedicated zones.

Stay tuned for more ways in which you can "quit" e-mail!

Additional Resources

• 40 minute fous for breakthrough results (3 minute video)

• The Results Curve(TM): How to Manage Focused and Collaborative Time (free download, Amazon booklet)

• Our upcoming Inbox Freedom online live workshop

PS: After reading Lynda's article about Exclamations marks, I tried to limit them in my article above, but still had more than two! I will try harder next time Lynda.

Guest blog article written by Lynda McDaniel, Founder and Director of the Association for Creative Business Writing

Last week, I read an amusing essay in the New York Times about the increasingly popular use of exclamation points in business writing, especially e-mail and texts. BE—before e-mail—any serious writer wouldn’t consider using them unless the comments were truly, well, exclamatory: “I never!” or “Goodness gracious!”

But AE—after e-mail—we’ve naturally gravitated toward using this happy-looking slash + period. I say naturally because after you’ve received your first 1,000 e-mails (which, sadly, can take less than a week), you can’t help but sense the cold, flatness of the medium. It drains the life out of the most animated prose. Back in writing school, they teach that if you need to use exclamation points, you probably need to rewrite and make your copy livelier. But these days, that's a tough sell when e-mail will cast a wet blanket over your best efforts.

And, frankly, who’s got that much time? Today, my students balk at proper grammar and punctuation; I can’t imagine suggesting that they take the time to make each word s-i-n-g. In an ideal world, that would be grand. In our real world, one or two exclamation points seem to work just fine. (Emphasis on "one or two." More on that in a minute.)

Reluctantly, as though they were confessing to a dark secret, several famous authors cited in the essay shared their predilection for exclamation points. Some did suggest restraint, however, and that’s what I teach as well. “More than one or two in an e-mail,” I often say, “and your e-mail looks more like a teenager’s diary than a business document. It won’t be taken seriously.”

The essay also quotes the co-author of one of the best books on the subject, Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better, by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe. “The exclamation point is the quickest and easiest way to kick things up a notch,” Schwalbe says, “but not if you’re angry. Only happy exclamation points.”

Good point!

Additional Resources

The Successfully Starting Your Writing Project Workshop: 9/14 (11:30 am to 1:00 pm Pacific Time)

The Business Writing for Success Workshop: 9/16 and 9/23 (11:30 am to 1:00 pm Pacific Time)

In my most recent interview at BNET, we got to work at the whiteboard again. I drew and explained how our mind works and how our own thoughts can be the biggest distraction of all, and then concluded with 3 specific techniques that can help us become better at staying focused, and also recovering quickly when our mind drifts into other unrelated territories or someone else interrupts our focus:

First Technique: Use a countdown timer

Not any timer – a countdown timer. Setting the countdown timer for 40 minutes (or whatever time period we choose) and then pushing the Start button has significant implications.

Just the fact that the timer is running seems to drastically heighten our awareness of time and allow us to quickly notice when we deviate from our task. It’s as simple as that. It is fascinating that such a simple and easy tool can have such an impact on our focus, but it does. Buying a countdown timer may very well result in the biggest return on investment that we can ever achieve!

Second Technique: Micro-Planning™ each 40 minute session

Creating a brief outline at the beginning of each 40 minute session listing key steps that we need to get done in order to complete the selected task can make the session as successful as it can be.

Ideally the Micro-Plan™ is handwritten in just a minute or two in the Notes section in the paper journal (described in the Accomplishing More With Less methodology).

Just like the timer, which appears to be a simple and perhaps expendable tool on the surface, Micro-Planning™ is a powerful technique that can help us stay focused, and if and when we have to deviate to take care of urgent issues, the Micro-Plan™ helps us restart our task with the minimum amount of effort and the fastest recovery time.

Third Technique: Turning Off External Interruptions

It sounds simple, and it would be if all external interruptions were within our control. Wishful thinking! Indeed, we can turn off the e-mail beep, forward the phone to voice mail, and indicate that we are busy or “away” in our Instant Messaging status, which we should do during our focus sessions. But it is much more difficult to switch off the people who stop by, the noise or conversations around our work area, and most importantly the urgent and critical requests that come from bosses, colleagues, customers, family and friends, not to mention the blame and guilt that come from not being available to handle all of the above promptly.

Staying focused in an ADD World--at the whiteboard

Additional Resources

• The complimentary Results Curve(tm) eBook download
• The Results Curve at Amazon.com
• 40-minute focus for breakthrough results--at the whiteboard

Guest blog article written by Dalya Massachi, M.A., Published Writer, Founder of Writing for Community Success

What do you think of when you first hear the word “marketing”? A bunch of deceptive hyperbole with no substance? A sleazy game that shady characters play when they are trying to get you to buy something that you don’t actually need or want? At some point, most of us have even said something like, “Oh, that’s just a marketing ploy.”

As a representative of a community-oriented effort, you definitely do not want your voice to be associated with empty promises. Fortunately, marketing does not have to be that way. Your organization is not just about building a better mousetrap that serves the community. You also want people with rodent-control problems to be aware of you, easily access you, consider supporting you, and spread the word about your work.

People working in the public interest increasingly acknowledge that we too have to get out there and hustle to attract attention to ourselves. Terms such as “social marketing,” “cause-related marketing,” “green marketing,” and even the old standby “outreach” come to mind. After all, if no one knows about your good work, you simply are not going to get very far.

So when I say “marketing” in the public-interest context, I am talking about:

Sharing information and enthusiasm about your work with interested people who may want to exchange their involvement or support for the value you add to them and their community.

That exchange is important. It is essentially an agreement, sometimes even a contract, between you and your reader. Remember: We are talking about dialogue that helps everyone win. That is what writing to make a difference is all about.

When you write on behalf of a community-benefit organization, you have to convey its work clearly, concisely, and persuasively. Your readers may include investors, clients, the press, activists, volunteers, colleagues, allies, and other stakeholders. You want to educate, inspire, and activate them. And to do that you have to write strategically to reach each specific type of reader. That is, you have to copywrite (notice the “w” in there).

When copywriting, you also want to cultivate relationships with your readers over the short and long term. You want to encourage them to see your work as credible, successful, and vital—a solid investment of their time and/or money. You are looking to strike a responsive chord, so that your relationship can grow from there.

To communicate to the right people, in a way that builds solid relationships, you have to treat everything you write as a potential marketing tool. The specific language you use will vary, of course, according to the type of document and the intended reader. (For example, you would not write a project or funding proposal in the style you use to write a brochure, flyer, or press release.) The tips I share in this book offer a wide range of concepts to consider, no matter what your writing task.

Additional Resources

Writing to Make a Difference (2 x 90-minute webinars, 8/12, 8/19 11:30 am Pacific Time)

Writing to Make a Difference (Book on Amazon.com)