THE biggest consumer of time for many business people is their email traffic. Many people have trouble getting through their Inbox each day. Instead of feeling frustrated, the solution lies in having a systematic method of dealing with it.
To handle this problem we have to break it down into its simplest form. There is no difference between handling emails compared to letters, faxes, phone calls, meetings and other conversations. They are all communications. They can be orders, requests, replies, information, junk mail, enquiries, notes or reports. Each one is a particle, whether electronic or physical.
In a business, every person has executive responsibility over their own area. An executive can do only five things with a particle: delegate it; file it; put it in pending; throw it out; or handle it. A valuable skill in an executive is correctly judging which action to take.
Delegating is not done nearly enough. Too many executives try to handle things themselves instead of empowering others to make decisions and take action. If duties and responsibilities haven’t been clearly defined for each team member it is hard to tell who handles what.
So communications go unhandled or get over-handled by multiple hands. If a particle has been delegated, you must allow your team member to get on with it without interference except to monitor progress and completion against a set time frame.
With filing, the most common error is not filing each particle into a reference system where it can easily be retrieved by anyone at any time. Included in good filing is the use of a diary system, which automatically alerts the executive to take action or check up on the progress of team actions after a set time has elapsed.
Some particles need to get set aside for a period of time. It’s best if they can be diarised, but many particles have no set time. Any particle once looked at must go somewhere outside of the inbox. It can’t sit there to be looked at repeatedly. If you don’t know what to do with something it is usually because information is missing so a judgement can’t be made. Therefore it has to go somewhere called “pending” while you get the missing gaps filled.
A pending box or basket should be gone through once each day and each particle reassessed. An empty pending box is a sign of efficiency.
We have junk mail and other filtering systems for unsolicited communications but a lot of what does come onto an executive’s desk has some degree of value. An unsolicited flyer about new earthmoving equipment could earn millions. A seemingly unwanted brochure about endangered frogs could act as an advance warning about building in a certain area and could avert a bad public relations move.
On the other hand, some information can be tremendously interesting for an individual but if it has no value to the workings of the business it must go in the bin.
The most important action is handling a particle, which means making one of the above judgements or managing the communication yourself so it can go back to where it came from as fully completed. This means doing the action required or acknowledging the communication, then getting the action done and following up with a report or acknowledgement that it is done.
Your day should not be spent in front of the computer handling your inbox unless your outcome consists solely of answered mail. The majority of your effort should be directed towards making sure others are achieving outcomes and initiating new work to be done.
Some work is done on the same computer that has the distracting inbox. An executive who sits waiting for emails or who allows an incoming email to interrupt his or her current work focus is going to get far less done than one who sets aside two interruption-free periods a day for the sole purpose of handling their inbox and other particles.