Workload Master

It’s amazing what you notice on vacation when your brain is otherwise engaged. Our last night of vacation last week was spent in a resort hotel operated by a major chain. We splurged by using a ton of points to stay in this luxury spa for our final night. Luck was with us because we were assigned to the concierge area (unlike the usual points award rooms next to the ice machines and party rooms… but I’m not complaining).

It was Friday night and we were pleased to learn that there was a wine tasting in the concierge lounge. When I dropped in to grab some wine I walked in with a gentleman carrying his laptop. He said to nobody in particular that he had to stop in to “do some e-mail” word that are like fingernails on a blackboard to me. But I was on vacation so I grabbed by wine and moved on.

Later that evening I popped in again to check out the complimentary deserts. There he still was furiously “doing e-mail” like there was no tomorrow…on Friday night…in vacationland. Oh well that’s his problem. I was off the clock and not ready to work with anxious e-mail guy.

Guess what, next morning as we stopped by for our complimentary free breakfast (I’m never one to pass up anything complimentary) there was anxious e-mail guy again. I just had to take a peek at his Outlook Inbox, and sure enough had well over 1,500 messages many unopened. Unfortunately see this all the time

E-mail anxiety is one of the major reasons companies and individuals hire me. It comes at us constantly at an ever increasing pace and is not going away. It should be nor more than an electronic version of mail, but it’s turned into a continuous interruption for so many people. Don’t become anxious e-mail guy and ruin your vacation. Apply the principles below to take control of your Inbox:

1. End every day with an empty Inbox (well at least no more that a screen full)
2. To get a fresh start move all old messages (no older that a week old) to a separate folder. Schedule time every day to process your old messages (see the 4-D process explained in item 4) until they are cleaned up.
3. Process your e-mail at specific times no more than three or four times per day. Tell your co-workers about your schedule to set expectations.
4. Use a repeatable process to work through all messages from top to bottom. I suggest the simple 4-D formula. Do it now. Decide to do it later (convert to a task to get it out of your Inbox), Delegate it or Delete it.
5. Drag and drop e-mails to convert them to tasks or appointments when appropriate (get them out of your Inbox).
6. Don’t use your Inbox as a task list. It’s a shipping and receiving dock not a long term storage facility.
7. Eliminate distracting “You’ve Got Mail” bells or alarms. Also turn off the Desktop Alert in Outlook that appears in the lower right hand corner of your screen when a new message arrives.
8. Change your default Outlook view to Calendar (by default it’s set to Inbox). Then only go to your Inbox when it’s time to process E-mail (see number 3). Looking at your Inbox all day diverts your focus from your real work to reading mail…a major distraction. When you have to create a new message either use the New drop down box in the upper left hand corner of all Outlook views choose Mail Message or just use the keyboard shortcut key CTL+SHIFT+M to create a message from anywhere within Outlook.

A word of warning. Don’t use these productivity principles to spend more time working. Use them to free up more time for yourself and your family.

What do you do to tame the e-mail beast? Please share your thoughts and ideas in the Comments below.