Learning how to use e-mail smartly is essential to succeeding in the modern work environment. Why? Because e-mail, which was supposed to improve work, actually makes us work harder. And I am not referring to just the time it takes to read or respond to e-mail. Rather, the real reason e-mail makes us work harder is that e-mail leads to many more business interactions per day than we ever could have before doing only live phone calls or in-person meetings. Both of those were limited by the hours in the day, but the e-mail inbox knows no such limits. And while more business interactions per day can multiply our business success (the up side of e-mail), each added interaction also leads to needed follow-up actions (work), and so there we are: we now have more work to do due to e-mail. So learning how to use e-mail smartly is essential to succeeding in the modern work environment.



Strategies to fix e-mail in today's office
But most people don’t think in terms of the potential for greater business success when it comes to e-mail, instead all they see is an overloaded inbox and the hours spent thrashing through their mail. There are lots of strategies people have tried to get around the e-mail problem and optimize its use. For example some people suggest you control when you read e-mail so as to decrease its impact on your workday. There is even an entire book titled: “Don’t Read E-mail in the Morning.” And some well-known personalities have posted “e-mail bankruptcy,” declaring null and void all old e-mail. The Governor of New Jersey recently announced he was quitting e-mail altogether.

The Solution
The problem is not with reading e-mail but rather with doing e-mail. It is not reading spam or unneeded cc’d mail that bogs down our ability to get through the inbox; it is reacting to meaningful e-mail, e-mail with potential actions for us to do, that skids us off track. It's this mail that kills a huge chunk of our day. The trouble is we do not have a natural way to prioritize our reactions to mail like this and our inbox and workday spins out of control.

The solution is to use the following core principle of my training and book:

Unless urgent, don’t take significant actions on e-mails when you first read them. Rather quickly convert action e-mails to prioritized, date-assigned Outlook Tasks, and continue to read or scan all your new mail to the bottom. Then file that mail out of the inbox. Then work tasks off today’s prioritized task list.

This is an important and powerful, and simple to implement rule. Here’s why it's important. What many of us do is try to work action requests as they arrive in the Inbox, thinking we are being proactive. The trouble with this that we all now get too much e-mail… way too much to act on everything each day. If we attempt to react to every e-mail, we will miss other important work. And in acting on mail as it comes in we are likely working our lowest priority tasks first. No wonder our important stuff is not complete at the end of the day. And we’ll never get to the bottom of our inbox that way.


Or others of us completely skip over most e-mail action requests and then spend hours, often days, later, trying to find the “important stuff” in our inbox to get caught up on them. What a mess and unnecessary churn this creates.

Instead, Speed through e-mail
Instead, I teach my students to speed through their mail by spending only a few seconds converting such action e-mails into prioritized dated tasks in Outlook, without taking action first, and moving on. They use simple to do Outlook techniques for converting e-mails to tasks. They then work them later along with their other work, in priority order. As a result, they end up purposely deferring many e-mail actions that do not make the priority cut, and that is a good thing in today’s overloaded work and e-mail environment. Only the important stuff gets first action.

By doing this, my students find they can get through all their e-mail quickly, and they feel good about the high quality work they choose to focus on. Those who take this approach and learn my task system say they finally can use e-mail smartly, and that e-mail no longer bogs down their day. And that their tasks are under control. This is the ideal way to approach the overloaded workday and inbox. See the book Total Workday Control Using Microsoft Outlook for complete coverage of how to do this, or contact me to organize a corporate seminar at your company.
 

Copyright 2007, Michael Linenberger

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