“I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.”
play King Richard II, William Shakespeare (dead English guy)
Email has become a bane in most of our professional lives.
We’re bombarded with email throughout the day and we sort through them in an attempt to figure out what is important and what is junk. As a result what was supposed to be a time enhancement has become a time quagmire.
Say the average time spend on each email is three minutes and you average 40 emails per day, that’s 2 hours spent on email. Now add the time for the daily phone calls we receive (and the shifts in priorities they bring), and you can see how quickly you can become time poor.
Here are two time management tips I’ve found helpful. The tips are a composite of various time management courses I've taken in my professional life.
First Tip, simplify your email to four basic responses-
1. Do it now- If the email needs a response and it will only take approximately two to five minutes, knock out the response as soon as you read it. If you don’t, you risk accumulating a mountain of email you have to respond to later in the week.
2. Decide When- If the email needs a response, but you can’t respond today, convert it to task and assign it to a specific day on your calendar. Don’t use our email as a task list.
3. Delegate/Distribute- Delegation, like intuition, is key trait to management & leadership. Train the people on your team and learn to trust them. Don’t try to do everything yourself. That’s a recipe for burn out and inefficiency.
On distributing the email, be careful here. Is the information really worth distributing? Don’t needlessly clutter other people’s mailboxes. I must get five “me-too” comments per day and they’re all annoying.
4. Delete- This has become my favorite response. Don’t save everything because of “just in case” anxiety. Your life will continue and the earth will continue to spin around the sun if you delete most of your email. If you really, really, have doubt, create a historical or archive folder and move grey-area email into it.
Back in the days of paper, I used to get my distribution/mail box full of stuff every day which I would carry back to my office. Once there, I would quickly glance at it and put in a tray. At the end of the week I would dump the tray into the trash can. My reasoning was that if it hadn’t bit me on my behind, or become important, by the end of the week, it wasn’t going to. That system served me well for several years. On those rare, rare, occasions when I did need something, the vendor who sent it, or a colleague could usually re-supply me the information.
Second Tip, email (by its very nature) turns you from proactive to reactive mode. Don’t begin your day with your inbox.
Begin your day by reviewing what your priorities are going to be that day, time allocated to fixed time tasks such as meeting or appointments, and your master task list. Decide what has to be done that day and what would be nice to do that day.
Since I do my planning based on a week unit, I also review this week and the following week to make sure nothing is about to blow up on me. This enables me to block out time on the calendar for what is important to me and prevents me from becoming time poor because I blindly reacted to other people’s priorities.
This planning also applies to what should be your main priorities in life: time with your family, worship, exercise, financial planning and true re-creation.
JP
play King Richard II, William Shakespeare (dead English guy)
Email has become a bane in most of our professional lives.
We’re bombarded with email throughout the day and we sort through them in an attempt to figure out what is important and what is junk. As a result what was supposed to be a time enhancement has become a time quagmire.
Say the average time spend on each email is three minutes and you average 40 emails per day, that’s 2 hours spent on email. Now add the time for the daily phone calls we receive (and the shifts in priorities they bring), and you can see how quickly you can become time poor.
Here are two time management tips I’ve found helpful. The tips are a composite of various time management courses I've taken in my professional life.
First Tip, simplify your email to four basic responses-
1. Do it now- If the email needs a response and it will only take approximately two to five minutes, knock out the response as soon as you read it. If you don’t, you risk accumulating a mountain of email you have to respond to later in the week.
2. Decide When- If the email needs a response, but you can’t respond today, convert it to task and assign it to a specific day on your calendar. Don’t use our email as a task list.
3. Delegate/Distribute- Delegation, like intuition, is key trait to management & leadership. Train the people on your team and learn to trust them. Don’t try to do everything yourself. That’s a recipe for burn out and inefficiency.
On distributing the email, be careful here. Is the information really worth distributing? Don’t needlessly clutter other people’s mailboxes. I must get five “me-too” comments per day and they’re all annoying.
4. Delete- This has become my favorite response. Don’t save everything because of “just in case” anxiety. Your life will continue and the earth will continue to spin around the sun if you delete most of your email. If you really, really, have doubt, create a historical or archive folder and move grey-area email into it.
Back in the days of paper, I used to get my distribution/mail box full of stuff every day which I would carry back to my office. Once there, I would quickly glance at it and put in a tray. At the end of the week I would dump the tray into the trash can. My reasoning was that if it hadn’t bit me on my behind, or become important, by the end of the week, it wasn’t going to. That system served me well for several years. On those rare, rare, occasions when I did need something, the vendor who sent it, or a colleague could usually re-supply me the information.
Second Tip, email (by its very nature) turns you from proactive to reactive mode. Don’t begin your day with your inbox.
Begin your day by reviewing what your priorities are going to be that day, time allocated to fixed time tasks such as meeting or appointments, and your master task list. Decide what has to be done that day and what would be nice to do that day.
Since I do my planning based on a week unit, I also review this week and the following week to make sure nothing is about to blow up on me. This enables me to block out time on the calendar for what is important to me and prevents me from becoming time poor because I blindly reacted to other people’s priorities.
This planning also applies to what should be your main priorities in life: time with your family, worship, exercise, financial planning and true re-creation.
JP
(For related subject matter visit, “On Spam and Viruses, Part 1 and 2.”)
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