Improving Productivity: EMails

Email has become one of the biggest communication tools (IMHO) after the pen, except of course email is much faster than snail mail and pigeon post. And because we think it is quicker we tend to spend more time on it.

Well a couple of thoughts for you with regards to email.

Do you know how much your hourly rate is? As in - if you went out to a client and charged them for your time, what would be your hourly rate? Now are you still willing to waste that kind of money on emails that really don't matter? By emails that don't matter I mean the SP*M messages that have filtered through, the jokes and the funnies. Whilst we all need some down time, these items should be filtered into a special folder for the end of the day (and preferably the end of a working week) and not read in prime working time.

And then there are the main emails we receive that need action. If you choose to open an email - then you should apply the same principles to it as you do with paper. Deal with it, delegate it or dump it. I also have a read later file - newsletters (electronic) as I do with the paper based journals I receive.

The final thought I will leave you with with regards to wasting precious time and therefore money on email is this. You don't sit next to your phone staring at it waiting for it to ring - so why is your email on during the day? If you're anything like me, you will have several accounts. I can spend just a few minutes at the beginning of each day clearing out and answering the messages I receive and then they are closed down again. I don't have the popups disturbing my thought processes. Of course you may argue that you "need" to have it open to answer messages as they are received....I will say - well you need to sleep, eat and go to the bathroom - you don't have your email wired into your head at these times, so surely a couple of times a day would be sufficient to deal with any new messages you receive. And if you think about it - if we were still in the paper era - we would have to wait for the mail delivery and how many times a day do we receive snail mail?

As always - many thoughts for a better and more productive 2009