Reduce Email, Increase Productivity
November 06, 2008 · Print This Article
Wedge is desperate to try the No Reply Necessary Tip that I mentioned the other day but fears:
it would damage relations with my colleagues, friends and random acquaintences [sic].
Yes, I agree that some people might take this the wrong way; however, in a corporate climate where unnecessary email clogs up too many in-boxes, I think we need to gently remind people about productivity.
Here’s a little graph I made for a training session I recently ran on how to use Email effectively.
The column on the left illustrates how much time is wasted per day on email; the column on the right shows what this means in terms of wasted minutes per year.
Effectively, if you’re wasting 15 minutes per day with unnecessary email, you’re wasting almost 4000 minutes per year.
This is one area in business where there is room to reassess how effectively we are using our time.
Use Email Templates
Personally, I recommend clients construct and use effective email templates.
Even if they are as simple as this one I use, they still save time. Over a year, the seconds add up to make minutes.
My personal favourite (Mac) tool for this is MailTemplate by the folks at Mactank.
How are you working to make email more effective?
I do the bulk of my emailing on the train or the bus, using my iPhone. I’m unable to read on public transport, and I have a 3-hour daily commute (1.5 hours each way door-to-door). I wouldn’t use the time for anything else. It feels like it shortens my journey - and it lets me play with my toy!
It also keeps my emails short!
I keep an empty in-box policy for both my .Mac account and my Gmail account.
For .Mac, I have two files: “Current” and “Old”. Every email I respond to, or don’t respond to but want to keep, gets moved to Current. Every few months I move everything from Current to Old. (In theory I could just have one archive file, but I find that Old can take a few seconds to open. I rarely need to look in Current, though.)
With Gmail I just click ‘Archive’ (or ‘All’ on my iPhone). Sometimes I star emails I’ll need to find again in a hurry; on the iPhone this is done by moving such emails into Starred instead of All.
For an email that I don’t immediately reply to, file without replying, or delete, I leave it in the Inbox until I can reply to it. I’ve trained myself into disliking having emails in my Inbox, and so I tend to sort them out as soon as I can. It’s rare that an email remains there from one day to the next.
The empty inbox approach really helps. I feel that I’m always on top of my email. And having an iPhone is a great way to put it into practice.
I have to admit, I’m not keen on the ‘No reply necessary’. If I used it I’d have to re-word it. What’s a business equivalent of ‘Don’t worry, I don’t need a reply to this email’? Oh, perhaps it’s ‘No reply required’. Or am I just splitting hairs?
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, D. Would like an iPhone to play with, I must admit.
I agree about keeping your Inbox empty. I only open > read/reply > file/trash when I have time. Otherwise things get out of hand.
---No Reply Necessary----
Sure, someone people won’t like the tone of it. But that’s the problem of email. You don’t get the paralinguistic info.
I’ve seen this phrase coming through on a lot of American emails lately. Perhaps we Europeans are a bit more sensitive.
No, I don’t think it’s splitting hairs. But what about:
---REDUCE UNNECESSARY EMAILS: No Reply Required----
Oh yes, I like that. It has the power of a movement behind it!
Within corporate communication I could accept No Reply Necessary [there’s no need to shout] but from a friend I would find it insulting, and said friend would likely find they never hear from me again.
When you e-mail someone but indicate you don’t want a reply, you’re giving them the message that while you expect them to listen to you, you have no desire to return the favor.
If people are worth e-mailing in the first place then those 15 minutes a day spent on replies are not “wasted” in my opinion.
We should take care in this cold, technical world not to lose our humanity.
@Wendy
Thanks for your thoughts!
The mails I’m targeting in particular are those business mails that don’t need a response. I would rather someone is upfront about it and say, hey, no reply necessary. I don’t always need a “Thank you” or “Your welcome” post. We’re all so busy, let’s keep emails to a minimum.
For example, if someone at work sends out a “The regular Friday drink after work is at...this week” email, they don’t really need 25 “Great! I’ll be there” emails.
You can do your “Thank you for organizing this” when you actually meet up.
Of course, it’s also really important to keep a human side to emailing and reply accordingly. I’m not against that. I’m just saying: let’s be clearer when we don’t need a response. I want to find an effective, polite way of doing this.
Bottom line: I think we need to rethink how we communicate electronically in the workplace. Maybe IM is actually better for some communications although there’s no easy way of archiving.
But that’s probably another blog post altogether.