Have you heard of the game dodgeball? where you have to avoid balls being thrown at you, pick up others and hit somebody with one shot? Now imagine if instead of balls you have email messages. Game on!
Let's face it: E-mail is a pain, it's in your life and your workplace, buried neck-deep, and theres nothing you can do about it, at least to avoid receiving them. But since you can have control of your life and your actions, I want to share my rules and code that I have implemented in order to make it through a week while enjoying my nights and weekends without feeling guilty that I'm falling behind on information.
Thanks to many trips I did to stores and cities in order to grasp the reality and real life operation of retail in our telco company, I was forced to develop and work on these ideas because after a couple of days being away, I would return and see my inbox clogged up, while stressing out and working extra time late at night. Also while visiting a store I would divert my attention to my phone in order to reply and answer as much as I could, wasting the visit.
In order to put a stop to this, I started to change my behavior and actions in order to adapt towards efficiency, e-mail related. I realized several things, read about others, and took decisions that needed to be done. I finally ended up with these simple rules that have made my life at work easier and more enjoyable:
1. Wait for a Call
Understand the priorities between the different communications channels you handle. The biggest 3 are Call, Email and Chat (IM, Whatsapp). If you are stressed about answering ALL your email (which you should never aim for... I'll explain in the next point) then you are headed for disaster. Just remember this quote I made up: If it's too important, they will call you.
2. Schedule your e-mail reading time.
Like any communication systems, e-mail arrival cannot be predicted and is random, so you have two options: Sit in front of your computer and reply endlessly as email arrives, which will end your day before you realize you had other things to do. Or schedule yourself to read your bulk of email at 3 different times a day, something like: 1 hour first time in the morning, 30 minutes before lunch, 30 minutes after lunch and if needed, 30 minutes before leaving the office.
3. Define what to answer immediately (and what not to).
Everything needs priorities, and emails are no exception. Identify your senders like your Boss, VP or from your team asking for critical decision or approvals to keep the KPIs on-track, and reply asap. Then the rest that can wait a couple of days for an answer, remember the next rule.
4. Answer six hours later to avoid chat-mail.
Or even simpler: if it arrives in the morning, answer it in the afternoon. If it arrived in the afternoon, answer it the next morning. This way you will avoid chat-mail. Remember? When you answer and then right away you get back the response, and again you answer right away and again you get a reply, meaning your colleague is right at this desk, looking at his Outlook, just like you.
5. Combine and set your tools properly
Your smartphone is the remote control of your life, hence you should have your email configured into the phone's client. This will allow you to know whats going on with your email, what has arrived, and most importantly, reduce your unread amount by tapping on the quickie emails such as the "thank you", or the auto-sent emails as reports (you only care about the latest one).
6. Use offline mode for weekends and nights.
This one is to benefit your team and colleagues. It is stressful to know while you are relaxing, doing your favorite activities, enjoying time with your family, that your email is clogging up. Start with yourself by asking: do I send emails late at night, during weekends and holidays? if the answer is yes, then you will probably receive them at those schedules too. You are also sending the message that the day is not enough for you and you are underproductive.
So if for some reason you want to clear your inbox during these off hours, make sure you are offline, answer your emails but keep them in the outbox folder, and send them the next morning. This will setup your day and your team in a very efficient way.
7. Group messages in conversation mode.
Important to accomplish a happy life with email is to have your email both in your smartphone and client grouped in conversation mode, so from several emails you can read the last one and discard the others. If you don't know what I'm talking about, take a look at this picture, and google the instructions for your email client.
8. Disable alarms and pop-ups.
If you apply all of the rules mentioned above, then you won't need any alarms and notifications bombarding your nerves. Disable all the pop-up, buzzers, vibration alarms, sound alarms and notifications from your computer and smartphone (apply for whatsapp too). All you need is the icon letting you know something new is there, so you remember to check when you access your phone or computer.
Hopefully, with these simple rules you will be able to improve your productivity by focusing on what really matters, and most importantly, teach your colleagues, employees or bosses a different a way, creating a culture geared towards simplicity and camaraderie. As always, I leave you a few questions so you can reflect and share:
- What other rules and actions did you implement to win at dodge-mail in your life?
- How did you come up with them?
I'd be glad to read about your ideas and experiences, let us know, through comments (not email!)
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