Time Management Tip #3 – Email Batching

In earlier Time Management Tips we looked at the Rule of 1440 to remind us that time is limited and we talked about the biggest time waster in the world. Today’s Time Management Tip will look at one of the most time consuming activities in the office environment: email. And instead of giving you a single tip today’s post is a bit longer than usual and in fact gives you eight hard-hitting time management tips!

Right, back to email. Email is a wonderful thing, isn’t it?

If you don’t get too much of it and that is where the problem lies.

Plus the fact that most of us have our email program on all the day long. An email arrives and a little message appears on the screen, or worse, you get treated to a little audible ping to tell you another important message has arrived. How can you resist right? With almost no delay you’re back in your inbox.

If you’re like most you’ll scan an incoming email, maybe even read it and then chances are you leave it in your inbox until you decide what to do with it later.

So how is that for time management?

Well it sucks. Big time.

But it doesn’t have to be that way and some people have already caught on to this. Not long ago I read an article which described how several global firms in Zurich don’t allow their bankers to check email more than twice per day.

And their reasoning for this restriction was clear and simple: the more their bankers check email, the more compelled they feel to send email. And so it continues until the in-tray burst at it seems.

For this Time Management Tip to succeed you need to change two things:

1. Check your email less frequently (so you send fewer messages)
2. Send fewer messages when you do check (so you trigger fewer exchanges)

So here are some concrete time management tips to help you start your email batching. Treat all of them as short experiments and customize them to suit your own style.

1. “Batch” email at specific times.

Set yourself an email-checking schedule and stick to it. If you don’t you will end up switching tasks all the time and this is ineffective and costly. U.S. statistics show that office workers spend 28% of their time switching from task to task because they’re interrupted. And in 40% of the cases they don’t resume the interrupted task in the next 24 hours.

Create a simple auto-reply telling people when you read/respond to your email and there how soon they can expect a reply. Tell that if they need anything sooner to call you. Experience shows that only 10% of “urgent” emails are actually followed up with a phone call.

You’ve just given yourself some breathing space to focus on the important stuff.

Make sure you don’t read email before 10 or 11 a.m. and never first thing in the morning, as you want a meaningful volume of work before you have to get reactive (i.e. respond to email).

2. Send and read email at different times.

Ever noticed how effective it is to respond to your email while on an airplane? Well, there is no reason why you can replicate that environment.

Simply go offline to batch send.

Use an offline email program like Outlook or Mail so that you can respond to email without being interrupted by newly arriving email. Make sure you setup Outlook or Mail to only synchronize when you open/close it.

3. Don’t scan email.

A simple example: don’t scan the inbox on Friday evening or over the weekend if you might encounter work problems that can’t be addressed until Monday. This is the perfect way to ruin a weekend with preoccupation. Remember that just as income has no value without time, time has no value without attention.

And the same during office hours, if you keep your email open and active chances are you will scan incoming emails and that will distract you. How often do you read an email and then decide to do something about it later? Not really an example of effective time management is it?

4. Don’t BIF people during off-hours.

“BIF” stands for “before I forget” and refers to emails sent on evenings or weekends out of fear of forgetting a to-do or follow-up. When you do this you create an expectation of 24/7 work hours and it causes big problems. There are many better ways you can manage BIF items.

Here are some ideas:

• Use a service like www.jott.com instead that allows you to send voice reminders via cell, which are transcribed and sent to your inbox or someone else’s. If to someone else’s, be sure to add “no need to respond until [next work hours].”
• If you prefer low-tech, externalize follow-ups and to-do’s in a small notebook instead. Make sure you always carry this notebook with you though.
• Personally I love using My Life Organized to manage all my to-do lists whether it is just for errands, phone calls to make or for actions on longer term work related projects. MLO is a truly great tool and you can run it on your desktop and have a synchronized version on your iPhone (or blackberry etc.) – how cool is that!

5. Don’t use the inbox for reminders or as a to-do list.

Related to 4 above. Don’t mark items as “unread,” star them, or otherwise leave them in the inbox as a constant reminder of required actions. This just creates visual distraction while leading you to evaluate the same items over and over. Put them into a calendar (or a Moleskine or other capturing system like MLO) for follow-up and archive the email, even if that calendar item is just “Respond to 2/10 email from Suzie.”

6. Set rules for email-to-phone escalation.

One Senior VP in a Fortune 500 company recently described how he established a simple rule with his direct reports that has cut email volume by almost 40%: once a d generates more than four emails total in a thread, someone needs to pick up the phone to resolve the issue.

7. Before writing an email, ask yourself: “what problem am I trying to solve?” or “what is my ideal outcome?”

Unclear purpose, usually a symptom of striving to be busy instead of productive, just requires later clarification from all parties and multiplies back-and-forth volume. Be clear in desired results or don’t hit that Send button.

8. Learn to make suggestions instead of asking questions.

Stop asking for suggestions or solutions and start proposing them. Begin with the small things. Rather than asking when someone would like to meet next week, propose your ideal times and second choices. If someone asks, “Where should we eat?”, “What movie should we watch?”, “What should we do tonight?”, or anything similar, do not reflect it back with “Well, what/when/where do you want to…?” Offer a solution. Stop the back and forth and make a decision. Practice this in both personal and professional environments. Here are a few lines that help (my favorites are the first and last):

“Can I make a suggestion?”

“I propose…”

“I’d like to propose…”

“I suggest that… what do you think?”

“Let’s try… and then try something else if that doesn’t work.”

Remember: in email, the small things are the big things. If you can cut an exchange from six to three email messages, that’s a 50% reduction in your inbox volume over time. This can make the difference between working all the time and leaving the office (both physically and mentally) at 5 p.m.

Less is more… at least it is in Time Management.