In Chinese philosophy there’s a concept called yin yang, which was later westernized into yin and yang. Yin and yang is used to describe disjointed or opposing forces that are in fact connected and interdependent, one, in turn, gives rise to the other. Loosely applying this concept to a relatively new phenomenon, email, I came up with the following ways to improve your productivity.
The yin: Increase your email effectiveness:
The yang: Reduce your email activity:
- Use the subject as a Headline. In a few words tell your reader what the email is about and the reason they should open it.
- Keep your email content clear and concise. Strive for brevity because the shorter-the-better rule applies. Emails that begin with, “We were talking at lunch…” are deleted immediately, so get to the point.
- If the issues can’t be addressed in a few sentences then it’s a phone call and not an email.
- Proofread your email for clarity and grammar before sending. For example, check your pronoun agreement: Using “he,’ “she,” and “they” (etc.) is fine as long as it’s crystal clear who you are referring to and both the gender and the number (singular or plural) are in agreement. Yes, this is one of my pet-peeves.
- Marking your email as “urgent” doesn’t mean it’ll be opened and read immediately. In fact, if you click the urgent button frequently you’ll be labeled a spammer or worse, a drama-queen, and find that your emails are being deleted unopened.
- Avoid jargon, acronyms, especially those popularized by the web like LOL (laugh out loud) and OMG (Oh my God!), unless you are emailing a close friend and/or that communication style is appropriate for the message.
The yang: Reduce your email activity:
- The surest way to reduce your inbound emails is to reduce your outbound emails. I set a goal to reduce my outbound emails by 25% once and, even though I didn’t keep precise records, having that “goal” reduced my output significantly, which led (I'm convinced) to significantly fewer inbound emails.
- Create a “four-, five- or six-week” folder and dump all your unimportant or non-critical, in other words all those CYA (cover-your-arse) emails, into that folder. Then set up your email system to automatically delete those emails after the prescribed time.
- Similarly, create a “Review later” folder and deposit all the emails you want to review later into that folder. I drop a lot of newsletters and marketing materials into my “Later” folder and review them while watching television. Setting them up for auto-delete is optional.
- Schedule email time. Let everyone know you “do email” for one hour in the morning and then catch up after 5:00. The message you’re sending is don’t call at 2:30 and say, “I just sent you an email, what do you think?” This is extreme but it seems to be a big productivity booster.
- Similarly, turn the email notification setting on your mobile device off during meetings. All the buzzing and vibrating is annoying and only adds to your (and everyone’s stress). Trust me, you’ll have plenty of emails to play with when you get back to your office. And don't even ask about sending emails while in the meeting...please.
- Reserve the use of Reply-to-All to rare occasions and then, use it only if everyone in the thread works for you or you are instructed to reply-to-all (by a higher-up). This, grrrr, arrrr…is also a real bugga-boo for me.
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