Thoughts from Howard Yermish about technology, music composition, wine, bicycling and being human.
If you are reading this, you may have figured out that I’ve been taking a little posting break since the beginning of the month. While you are relaxing at a BBQ this weekend, consider this…
Before email, postal mail arrived (and still does) only once per day. What if email only arrived four times per day? How would this affect your productivity and your stress level?
(Post your comments below.)
How deep is your email inbox? Seriously, how deep.
I’ve been there from time to time, but I’ve been proactively working to keep my inbox as close to empty as possible.
If your inbox is over 2000 messages deep, you might need to do something radical.
Perhaps you should declare email bankruptcy. Here is how:
It is quite refreshing. Don’t worry, people will understand.
On Friday, NPR’s Morning Edition ran the following segment:
Can you go a day at the office without e-mail? Employees at U.S. Cellular try to do that every Friday. A policy implemented a few years ago gives workers a respite from the e-mail avalanche.
Click to read and listen…
Interesting story considering the topic of my recent post about choosing the right messaging medium. I appreciated that the story points out the initial resistance from people, but ultimately, people made additional connections with others.
While you might not be able to force your organization, you can do this yourself, perhaps for a whole day, or even just a couple of hours.
Sometimes you just have to take a step back and point out the obvious.
Today was one of those times. I was in the middle of typing out a detailed email message that was going to be longer than five sentences when a blinding flash of the obvious hit me: pick up the phone.
So I did and it worked. I’m glad that I started typing the email, but very glad that I didn’t click send. Starting to type things out allowed me to collect my thoughts around a difficult conversation. When I picked up the phone, I was clear and concise and convincing. And I think the person that I talked to appreciated that.
Many business professionals carry around an iPhone, Blackberry, Treo or other smartphone. So there is the opportunity to talk, text message or email right from the palm of your hand. But it doesn’t take an email ninja to know when to use the right tool, just one simple rule:
Respect the recipient.
If you have something difficult to share with someone, don’t hide behind an email message. Yes, write a letter or create an outline to organize your thoughts at first. Hiding behind the email message will actually make it more difficult for you in the long run. My rule is that if you are having a hard time picking up the phone, you probably really need to pick up the phone.
If you need an answer right away, email is not the best choice. Yes it is true, email is seriously fast, but it also creates email inbox clutter. Most people leave hundreds or thousands of messages in their email, so if you can simply send a quick instant message with your question, you might just get an immediate answer!
Text messages are great for the one-liners that are time sensitive. Examples such as, “Caught in long meeting and running late,” or “Please stop for pizza on the way home,” or “Do not cut the blue wire.” SMS is relatively instant and if for some reason it doesn’t get through, it keeps trying. For the recipient, they get some form of a beep. If needed, responses are typically very short, such as “No prob,” “OK,” or “Too late.”
What are your best suggestions that “respect the recipient” for phone, email, IM and text messages?
If you are someone who likes to forward jokes around, you need to be respectful of everyone’s email addresses. Don’t throw all of those addresses in the TO: or CC: field. Use the BCC: field so that others don’t see the full list of emails.
And if you receive these emails from family or friends, send them the above link as a kind way to teach them the right way to do it.
Lifehacker posts a great top 10 list for email productivity…
How many messages are in your email inbox right now? Seriously, I have seen too many people become completely overwhelmed by the onslaught of email. Just because it is digital doesn’t give you an excuse to become an e-packrat.
And once your email inbox gets too deep to manage, what do you do? You probably scroll up and down to find a message from someone or from three days ago. Maybe you organize your messages into a nested collection of folders for co-workers, clients, projects, friends, humor, etc. If you are lucky, your email has a great search tool or “smart” filtering capability, but most people barely know how to use this at all.
It all just seems like too much work.
What would you do differently if your email program only stored messages for 24 hours?
Or is the question really this: once you have read an email message the first time, what is it still doing in your inbox?
Most people know what spam is…Viagra advertisement, unsolicited stock tip, lottery winning notification from somewhere in Europe, etc.
But what is Bacn? (It’s pronounced bacon, but in Web 2.0 lingo.)
Bacn is email that you asked for and perhaps want to read at some point, but it isn’t remotely urgent. Bacn tastes like this:
The amazing thing about Bacn is that if you ignore it, more will show up later. When you have time to read it, you appreciate the message, perhaps even enjoy reading the messages. When you don’t have time, Bacn clutters your overstuffed email inbox.
My rule about Bacn:
If you don’t have time to read it right now, delete it right now.
You will never have enough time to catch up on all of those useful stories, tips and such. And if you find that you consistently delete a particular flavor of Bacn, unsubscribe from it. Most Bacn messages have an unsubscribe link at the bottom which takes less then 10 seconds to click and confirm.
Don’t get me wrong, email is a fantastic communication tool and I wish that everyone used email. But too often I see email as a constant distraction.
Think about this…You have Outlook open in the background and you start to do some productive work and only 5 minutes later, the new message sound goes off or alert pops up on your screen. Instant interruption. And then your brain starts to debate whether or not to check to see what the message is about. After all, it might be extremely important. So, you flip over to your email program only to find that the message didn’t require your immediate attention, or more likely, was some junk message that you immediately deleted.
The problem is now you are looking at your email inbox only to see hundreds or thousands of messages that you haven’t dealt with. Your productive time is shot because while your computer can have many programs open, your brain can only focus on one thing at a time and right now it is your email inbox. So even if you go back to what you were originally doing, you have only a few more minutes before the next email interruption.
Over the next few weeks and months, I’m going to be writing about how I’ve gotten control over my email inbox in a way that most people find completely inconceivable.
My first tip is this: Close your email program. Not permanently, but for at least two to three hours each day, don’t even have it open. No alerts, sounds, or other email distractions; you have work to do and surely it doesn’t require Outlook to be open.
If you’ve been around email long enough, you have certainly experienced the misunderstandings that email can sometimes cause. But to go even further, how do you make sure that your emails will actually help get things done. The key is to write about one thing per email.
From Web Worker Daily’s article “7 Rules for Communicating Clearly and Concisely in Email…”
“The truth is that people don’t have time for long emails, and they don’t have time to try to find out exactly what you want. You have to tell them, in as short an email as possible.”
Lots of good tips for those of you that use email every day.
