Executive Travel SkyGuide

PRODUCTIVITY

Learning to Quit
Curb your technology compulsion and get the email monkey off your back.
by Karen Goodwin – Executive Travel – 10/01/04

Not long ago, Rich Libby received 800 emails a day. As a technology vice president and group manager for Washington Mutual (WaMu), Libby oversees a staff of 100 in three cities. All day long, he'd process email questions and read carbon copy (cc) messages from his staff. "I'd just sit there and watch them pour in."

Today, Libby has reduced his email volume to a more manageable 200 a day. How did he do it? Like any addict, he sought professional help—not just for himself, but for his direct reports. The idea of a clean inbox caught on. To stem the tide of irrelevant messages company-wide, all of WaMu's Seattle bank employees took a one-day seminar offered by Denver-based McGhee Productivity Solutions on how to use technology more productively.

"The problem isn't technology," says Sally McGhee, managing partner, "but rather the lack of education about its best use."

Indeed, these days many corporate employees seem to be drowning in email, instant messaging, cell phones, pagers and land lines. Email in particular has become the communication method of choice for adults. According to one survey, 60 percent of U.S. Internet users prefer reading email to ordinary mail, while 34 percent would rather send an email than make a telephone call. And it will only get worse. Daily email traffic is expected to rise to 60 billion messages in 2006, up from 31 billion in 2003, says International Data Corporation.

So, how should companies handle the daily data deluge? One British tycoon (who does not use email) banned his 2,500 employees from using it internally, claiming it would save the staff three hours a day in time and the company at least £1 million a month.

But often that's not realistic in today's cyber-information age. And, according to experts, it's not the technology itself, it's how you use it. "People often get in excess of 250 emails a day, and are doing emails on their Blackberries while driving," McGhee says. "But the problem is not the medium. It's that people have forgotten how to create boundaries.

"If you don't set the expectations, other people will," she says. Here's some advice on how to reset them to gain not only productivity but liberation from the Net.

1) Think before you write. McGhee calls email a "reactive" medium, because people often respond within three minutes of receipt—simply because they can. Therefore, a lot of emails are not clear or comprehensive, which generates more email responses with questions. "Sending emails that don't require a response can reduce your emails by 20 percent," McGhee says. "If you think your emails will come back with questions, think about what you need to say so they won't."

2) Step away from the keyboard. Each department (or individual) can establish a standard email response time (McGhee generally recommends eight or 24 hours). "Let people know what the response time will be," she suggests. "That way you can pause and think about what you're going to say and write something sensible, rather than just rattling off something unstructured that will produce more emails."

3) Disable the dinger. McGhee instructs clients to stop looking at their email all day long. "People are addicted to the ding [that signals an arriving email]. Turn it off." She recommends setting aside an hour in the morning (schedule it on your calendar) to do nothing but go through email, with no interruptions. "On average, people can process 60 emails an hour. If you get 120, which is a lot, you can do an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening, and it's gone."

4) Take immediate, decisive action. A decision about what to do with each email should be made in less than two minutes, McGhee says. "Most executives look at their email and say, 'I can't deal with this right now,' and they close it back in their inbox. Rather, they must immediately judge what to do with the email and process it." McGhee times them with a stopwatch, reminding them of the Four Ds: delete it, do it (decide what action needs to be taken and complete it), delegate it or defer it (to a task list). "That alone helps eliminate 50 percent of their email," she says.

5) Clean house. People often use their inbox as a filing cabinet. WaMu's Libby learned to turn email into a task, save it as a document or get rid of it. "I deleted several thousand emails during my [productivity] seminar," he said. "It was kind of liberating."

6) Compose targeted subject lines, and don't cc the universe. Ideally, an email recipient must take action, respond, just read it or file it. Put one of these suggested options in your subject line. Send an email only if it relates to the recipient's objectives. (Conversely, read an email only if it relates to your objectives.) Include on the cc line only those whose objectives are impacted by the correspondence. Libby found that instructing his staff to write detailed subject lines significantly cut back on his email volume. "Emails that say 'call me' or 'important' have gone away, for the most part. If I get one, I ask them never to do it again. If it's a blank subject line, it'll probably be deleted."

7) Resist checking email while on vacation (32 percent of us do, according to a Harris Interactive survey). Write an out-of-office reply that says you will not be responding to email until a certain date, and list contact information for a colleague who can provide assistance. When you return from vacation, schedule a day in the office to go through your accumulated email.

8) Stop unwieldy threaded emails. If a threaded discussion has more than six responses, don't continue the thread. "The person who started it should pick it up and find another solution," McGhee advises. "More often than not, the initiating email was not clear, which is why it continues as a thread." Use another medium to get the information you need—on a discussion database (where you can archive messages with better searchability), in conference calls or as an agenda item for an existing meeting.

9) Don't multitask. Working on several things at once seems productive, but you're not giving your full attention to any one thing, so you are distracted, according to a Carnegie Mellon University study. People who continually interrupt themselves to answer email don't do the priority work they intended to do that day, the study found, and are therefore less efficient.

10) Employ instant messaging. If you need a response in less than two minutes, use IM (if your company has it), so you don't clog up email systems.

Individuals and entire departments can make email efficiency changes, but experts agree that it's best if it comes from the top. Chances are you'll mimic your boss's style. "If your boss cc's everyone, you are going to cc everyone. If your boss doesn't respond to emails for eight hours, it forces you to write emails in a very proactive fashion, because you know you won't get a response for eight hours," McGhee says. "Once people at the top want to change, it spreads like wildfire."

McGhee emphasizes that the new behavior must be reinforced. Companies that are truly serious about change include the quality of emails in performance reviews. "If you don't reinforce it, people will think, 'That was a nice idea,' and then go back to doing what they've always done."

Still, changing email habits is "no different than dieting or exercise," McGhee says. "It's a discipline, and people do fall off the wagon." Libby reported that he's had a good deal of success so far, but he knows he has to stick with it. He equated the instant gratification of constant email monitoring with the spike one gets from junk food. "After you lose your first 10 pounds, you say, 'Ah, that ice cream is not going to hurt,' and you fall back into it again." Still, he's acutely aware of the gains he's made. "I don't want to think about where I'd be had I not taken that productivity class."

Get a life

Is technology running your life? Do you use your Blackberry in the car, spend hours at night catching up on email and constantly check it while on vacation?

There is life beyond work, according to Sally McGhee, managing partner of McGhee Productivity Solutions in Denver, Colo. (www.mcgheeproductivity.com).

She believes so strongly in the premise of a properly balanced work/home life that she wrote a book called Take Back Your Life!: Using Microsoft Outlook to Get Organized and Stay Organized.

As a productivity consultant for more than 20 years, McGhee tells people they can still be very productive at work, plus have a life outside the office. "Balance is not a dirty word," she says. "Know when to turn email and the cell phone off."

A view from the top

Information services can make your life easier

You can employ more efficient email habits, but a company's IS department also can dramatically reduce your volume of email. Spam filters alone can block 60 to 70 percent of email traffic, according to John Johnston, chief information officer for ValleyCrest Companies in Calabasas, Calif.

Johnston has other ideas on how companies can use the right technologies to prevent email bloat:

• Encourage employees to take training seminars to make the most effective use of the email system and its customized mail filters (which can dramatically reduce items sent directly to your inbox).

• Don't email an announcement to 2,000 people about John Doe's promotion with an attached 50K Word document (which clogs the email system). Instead, provide a link to a message posted on an Intranet. Or better yet, just post it on the Intranet.

• Don't email an attached report, proposal or presentation to 20 people, since they significantly bog down systems when downloading (particularly remote ones). Better to post the information on a collaborative database, such as Lotus Notes or Microsoft Sharepoint, and either direct people to it or send a link.

• Instant messaging is a wonderful tool for short messages, but they must be confined to company-only use to evade viruses.

• Don't use email for threaded discussions. Have them on collaborative, central databases, which allow you to archive and retrieve the information easily. "That way you and five other people aren't schlepping the information around in your email for a year."

• Buy a bigger computer monitor. Upgrading to a 17- or 19- inch monitor from a 15-inch allows people to look at their email headers on the left and view messages on a preview pane on the right. "This allows you to blast through emails at about 10 times the rate. I can read the email on the right and only open it if I'm going to answer it."

These technologies are not that expensive to deploy, Johnston says. "And they will help ensure that employees receive higher quality email."

Karen Goodwin is a freelance writer based in Colorado.