E-mail is a time killer – how to control the beast

I hate email.

E-mail is the #1 communication method I use every single day in my personal and private life and I suspect it is the same for you.

How many times have you suffered from missing an important email, losing a communication or sending an email in a hurry and having the meaning completely misunderstood by the recipient? Even more important, how many hours of your life are wasted dealing with useless e-mail?

In many companies, e-mail is out of control and people use it for everything: newsletters, broadcasts, arranging meetings, sending documents, recording approvals, chat. On average I receive between 100-200 emails per day and this is similar to most people (the average office worker receives 121 emails per day and sends 40). I have seen some email inboxes with 4000 to 5000 unread emails.

Some aspects of business communication are changing with tools like Slack, MS Teams and Skype for business but email will persist as the dominant communication technology for the foreseeable future.

If we want to be effective in business and life, it is critical that we tame this email monster. Here I have laid out some simple tips and tricks which I think can help you. 

Some important areas to think about in relation to e-mail generally:

1. When to use email vs other forms of communication
2. How to efficiently use e-mail
3. Processing email

When to use email.

To be an effective communicator you need to consider the best situations in which to use email.

Pros:

• Fast – instantaneous and logged (compared to physical letters)
• Ubiquitous – You will struggle to find anyone without an e-mail address which is not monitored regularly 
• Direct – email addresses are usually associated with individuals
• Persistent – Email messages can be saved for very long durations
• Simple – Easy to use, create and send.

Cons:

• Overused – keep in mind your recipient could have 3000 other unread emails
• Easy to misunderstand – they are often written and read quickly so it is hard to convey tone and more subtle messages, the reader can easily misinterpret the message.
• Can be missed / overlooked – even though transmission is instant, it is easy for people to miss a message or not read the content on time.
• Persistent – this can be dangerous in certain circumstances as once sent they cannot be recalled or deleted by the sender.

In the work environment, you should always think twice about sending an e-mail. Ask yourself if it is the best way to perform the action you are taking. Once you have decided to send an email you then need to think about who the recipients should be, especially when CC’ing or worse BCC’ing people. In some situations, the TO, CC and BCC list are more important than the content of the e-mail. Imagine that each time you send someone an email you are taking minutes of their life… treat their time with respect and don’t include them unless you need to.

Email efficiency

When sending emails, brevity is key. Keep the message short and clear. Most people will spend less than 10 seconds reading and processing the message. This takes some practice, especially for non-native English speakers, but it is important. Re-read your key emails each time and try to remove 30% of the words which are not adding value.

As a recipient which would you prefer?

‘We need this tomorrow’

‘We really need to get this tomorrow as it is important for us to move forward with the task’

E-mail is not a good long-term database of information. In business, if you need to track approvals on a project or maintain a list of key information do not build a process around e-mail. Move this to more bespoke tools: use a CRM (Salesforce.com), ERP (Oracle, SAP) or other tools to manage and track day-to-day business operations. 

Processing

It is well known that frequent interruptions are highly detrimental to productivity, so turn off your e-mail notifications. When receiving 100+ messages per day you cannot afford to have your attention interrupted 100 times. This will kill your ability to concentrate and produce work in an effective way. 

An excellent tip which I have taken from the book by Tim Ferris – The 4-hour Work Week – is to batch process emails. I, therefore, select a few 1 hr slots throughout my week where I only work on processing my outstanding e-mails. Outside of this time, I work hard to fight the urge to check my email regularly and only scan for important emails written directly to me (which you can usually see in the 3 line email summary). 

DO NOT FILE EMAIL

When I first started at GE, I had very elaborate email filing systems and I would pride myself each time I could get my inbox empty and have all my emails filed away. I wasted hundreds of hours doing this. With today’s email programs there is simply no need to file any email. The only choice you need to make is ‘delete’ or ‘archive’.

Gmail has been pioneering this archive and search system but it is also available on Outlook and other systems. 

In Outlook you can directly assign a keyboard shortcut to “archive”. I have set up my system so that backspace will archive the selected e-mail.

It has been shown in research papers that people with archive and search systems are faster at retrieving and less likely to lose specific emails than people who have filing systems. 

Be ruthless with deleting emails. 

90% of the emails you receive will never be needed again so just delete them. If they are really that important then the sender will have a copy in their outbox to re-send if they need to. 

I hope this article was helpful to get you thinking about how you use e-mail. This is a critical skill that, if you can master it, will improve your life in many ways, tighten up the effectiveness of your communication and save you countless wasted hours.