I try to share insights on the very strategic, purposeful things you can do to create success.  Making Time & Energy is a big topic becasue it’s critically important to find ways to
not be overwhelmed by your job.

You need to make room so you can do all the extra things, in addition to your job description, which are necessary to be an effective leader, create success and enjoy your life more.

Part of it is about Ruthless Priorities, part of it is about planning and organization, and part of it is about managing your energy.

But email always seems to come up as huge time sink, an energy drain, and an obstacle to making progress on more strategic things.

So I thought I would use one blog post on the seemingly tactical topic of email to share some of the best practices I have collected over time about not letting email take over your life.  I encourage you to add your ideas as well.

1) An hour a day.
If you are doing email every night for hours after dinner you are doing something wrong.  Think about budgeting only one hour per day for email.  How would you make sure you got to the most critical stuff?  How much time in your day is email worth?  Set a time limit based on what it deserves compared to other things.

2) Get the Time of Day Right
Turn off the beeps, the alerts, the pop-up windows, and don’t do email during prime time.  If you are at your best first thing in the morning, do real work and don’t waste your best brain on email.  Set up an auto-responder that lets people know that you answer email at noon and 5pm so you are seen as being responsive.

3) Don’t read all your email.
This is a subset of the general advice “Don’t do everything”.  Successful people succeed because they don’t try to do everything, not in spite of this. You need to focus your attention and energy on excelling at a few critical items, vs. doing a marginal job on everything.   Deal with the email that impacts your critical priorities and let the rest go.  The phone will ring if you miss something really important.

4) Catch what’s most important
Use filters to find the emails coming from you boss, board members, top clients, etc. to make sure you don’t miss those.  Only read things you are in the “TO” list not just “CC’d”.

5) File instead of read.
One woman I met had a goal for email that was simply to never lose an email from a key client.  When she got emails she didn’t read them as she got several hundred a day.  She would just file them in a folder for that client, and if something ever came up that was in an email, she would search for it in the moment.

6) Quick reply
When you get an email from someone who wants to give you input or get your opinion, sometimes “got it, thanks” is all you ever need to do.  You will be seen as being very responsive without spending lots of time responding to everything.  Always acknowledge input from people.

7 ) Zero-inbox
I led a series of Career Workshops where at least one person in every workshop boasted  that they kept zero messages in their inbox.  I was amazed, as were the other participants.

It got me thinking about the fact that I personally wasted a lot of time searching for messages I sent or received, or just poking around in my inbox to see what I might need to act on.  I probably spent about 2-4 hours/week on these time wasters.

I used to have between 1200-2000 messages in my inbox at any point in time.  Now I have had zero for the past 7 months.  I get almost giddy when I think about how much time and frustration I save.

Here is the trick.

Act on any message you can in the moment.  Deal with it or delete it. For the others:

Come up with categories that work for you.  You need two types of categories: Action and Save.

My Action categories are:

DO: I need to do something in the real world, call someone, research something, etc.
REPLY:  I need to send an email reply but can’t do it in the moment
FOLLOW UP: date stamp for follow-up and get out of inbox.

My Save Categories are:

CLIENTS OR PROJECTS: one folder for each
TRAVEL: Itineraries & Travel Logistics
ACCOUNTS:  login and account info for various online systems
RESOURCES:  pointers to interesting stuff I may use later
GOOD STUFF: things worth saving that I will want to reference in the future
WAITING:  information I will need in the future but does not require any specific action now

The Dramatic Improvement:

It took me about 6 hours one day to re-classify or delete everything in my inbox. That was no fun.
But now it takes me about 1-10 minutes each day to clear my inbox.
I do not search for “lost” messages any more.
I do not poke around in my inbox any more.

I schedule time to take action on email.  Then I get right to the DO and to the Reply folders without needing to look for anything.  I save at least 3 hours a week, and I’m more productive on the things that I act on.

What things have you done to keep email from taking over your life?  Please share what works best for you.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 19th, 2008 at 7:12 pm and is filed under Personal Effectiveness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.