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Jerry Osteryoung
Small Business Advice
Tips on taming the email monster
"It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics." ~ Ernest Hemingway
With social media, email, mobile phones, text and the regular old telephone, keeping track of all the ways information pours in can be overwhelming to every manager and most employees.
Email in particular seems to eat more time than any other method of communication.
In my line of work, I am always meeting with executives. Often, I walk into their offices just before our appointment and catch them hard at work on something. When I ask them what they were so focused on, they just about always answer with exasperation, “Email!”
Just like these executives, many of us spend much of our time responding to emails.
For example, a good friend of mine once spent three days responding to one email. I did everything I could to get him to recognize what a time suck this behavior was – even wrote a column about it – yet he was convinced his time was well-spent.
Another entrepreneur insists that she review every email sent from the business before it goes out. She goes through more than 500 emails each day and, on some days, is at it for more than four hours!
These are a couple of extreme examples, but I think we can all attest to the fact that email has swallowed more of our time than we would like to admit.
The key to getting a handle on this is setting a maximum amount of time to commit to this task each day. For some, this is one hour. For others, it is two. The important thing is that you limit the time you spend responding to emails.
Setting a limit like this forces you to prioritize your emails and attack your inbox strategically. Maybe you need to respond to your staff’s concerns first and then address others if time allows. Or maybe you only respond to those that indicate they are high priority in the subject line (of course, if this is your process, you would need to tell the folks you communicate with). The point here is establishing a process that allows you to deal with the most important issues in your inbox while limiting the time you spend on email.
One thing you can do to help is limit the number of messages that hit your email in the first place. Give colleagues and staff some guidance about which emails you want to be copied on. For example, you might request that you are only copied when your department is directly affected.
Another thing you can do is tell your staff that emails need to include a specific request in the subject line. This will force them to clearly specify what they are requesting early on and allow you to quickly respond.
A third suggestion is limiting your e-mails to one point only. Too often we try to cover too many issues in one message, and it takes more time to digest the material. Keeping to just one topic per message will help you get control of the email monster.
Now go out and establish “rules of engagement” for your email.
You can do this!
| Other small business advice columns from Dr. Osteryoung are here. |
Jerry Osteryoung is a consultant to businesses - he has directly assisted over 3,000 firms. He is the Jim Moran Professor of Entrepreneurship (Emeritus) and Professor of Finance (Emeritus) at Florida State University. He was the founding Executive Director of The Jim Moran Institute and served in that position from 1995 through 2008. His newest book co-authored with Tim O'Brien, "If You Have Employees, You Really Need This Book," is an Amazon.com bestseller. He can be reached by e-mail at jerry.osteryoung@gmail.com.
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