Your phone rings when the caller wants it to ring, which means you have less control, however when it comes to answering emails you have a certain amount of control unless you prefer to lose it. For a maximum of efficiency and productivity (and a maximum of spare time) try to finish dealing with every new message the moment you see it first if this is at all possible.

If you think you cannot deal with a message at this time, do not open it. If you read a message but do not take care of it you will have to read it again when you do have the time to deal with it.

A curious feature of today’s business life is that the ‘emergency-crisis’ atmosphere has now taken over as the norm. You spend most of the day not only working at the computer, but poised on high alert, ready to put out those instant ‘brushfires’ that suddenly erupt - in other words, handling your e-mail, or more accurately, being handled by it.

There is an important difference between two kinds of working time - the constructive kind where you control the operation, and the disruptive kind where you are forced to break-off and respond to interruptions. Anyone who has studied time management would immediately identify e-mail as a major cause of the second one.

It’s easy to see the effect on performance. Anyone responsible for analyzing a problem is going to spend all day being distracted from it, unable to dig down properly into the subject. There is no such thing as a solid hour - only sixty lots of one-minute panics, liable to keep the mind in an entirely superficial mode.

You don’t need to see every piece of email the second it arrives. If you’re using an email program that announces the arrival of new email, turn off the program’s announcement features, such as making a sound or having a pop-up screen announce the arrival of email.

The first part of the solution is to defuse the ‘hurry-hurry’ impact of that ‘new e-mail’ alert which is undoubtedly very hard to resist. After all, it could be anything. But keeping the alert switched-on is the equivalent of never leaving the house in case an important letter arrives. Perhaps once in five hundred, you’re going to miss something. Simply arrange to check your e-mails at a sensible interval - every couple of hours is quite adequate. Try it for a week or two, and see how many real emergencies blew up during your short absences. Not many.

Finally, managers should try to keep their whole department ‘e-mail-savvy’, as an essential business requirement. How to set up an efficient archive… Integrating e-mails with electronic calendars… Reporting spam to your internet service provider… These may seem like minor issues, but all put together; they significantly speed and streamline the conduct of daily business.

As well as improving performance, these interventions will also put you confidently in command of your e-mail programme, and eliminate unnecessary worry and artificial pressure.

Tags: Lifestyle, Management //