Ding! A tiny icon in the shape of an envelope flashes in the corner of your screen. Your heart races every so slightly as adrenaline rushes through your body. You are in the middle of analyzing inventory data from your last field visit, but you can’t seem to stop yourself from checking the email. You click and see it is from your boss asking about a project due next week. Instantly, you switch gears because if your boss is asking, it must be urgent.
But is it truly urgent at that moment? Is it more important than the project you are working on?
Likely, it isn’t important right then. It might not even be important at all. But this is the email trap you fall into. An email comes in, you read it and stop what you are doing to deal with it. There is no analysis of its importance. Next thing you know, you spend your day responding to emails rather than addressing the priorities you planned.
You learned in Creating Time that planning your priority work makes time. When you spend time currency reacting rather than acting, you have stopped watching your own back to address someone else’s priorities. Your own goals fly out the window.
It all boils down to letting email manage you rather than you managing your actions around emails. By giving yourself permission to use the strategies below, email becomes a tool rather than a weight around your neck.
- Turn off the notifications – even minor distractions take focus away from your task at hand and it can take as much as 15 minutes to refocus. That’s a lot of wasted time.
- Master the Four D’s – use these for each email that comes in. Every one can fit into a category below:
- Delete – if you will not read it or respond, delete it (or file without opening).
- Deal with It – if it is urgent to respond right away, like a data call with a turnaround that day, then deal with it as soon as you open it.
- Delegate It – allow someone else to respond. If someone on your team is better suited to responding, let them. If you are cc’d and it isn’t your responsibility but someone else’s, let them deal with it.
- Delay It – if it is important but not yet urgent, schedule it for another day and deal with it then. Even an email from a superior isn’t always urgent, so be shrewdly deciding.
- Three strikes and use the Phone – if you go back and forth on an email over three times, pick up the phone. You are past the point where email is an effective communication tool. A phone call will resolve the issue much faster.
- Unsubscribe – it is easy to get on lists for all kinds of newsletters. If you save these hoping you will one day read them, stop. You won’t go back and it creates clutter and distractions within your inbox.
- Use Rules, Flags and Other Outlook features – learn tools in outlook like rules and flags. Outlook can automatically sort emails that are similar to a separate folder to be handled in one bundle.
The next first step starts by choosing one technique and trying it out. Each one will create additional time in your day. Some more than others, but each minute adds up. Once you’ve mastered one, pick a second one and master it. Do not dismiss a strategy because you’ve think it won’t work. You don’t know until you give it at least two weeks. Be your own experiment.
In time, you will use these techniques with ease, finding and making time in your day, and using email as the tool it should be rather than letting it manage you.
