Email is NOT a meeting! Don’t try to make it one!
Some people use e-mail to “discuss” issues and gain opinions. Each time an opinion question is sent to numerous people or to a group list, the e-mails tend to develop branches: the opinions multiply exponentially, the threads take on different paths, and each recipient is now receives multiple strings of the same subject e-mail that have gone in different directions. It all results in spending much more collective time than a one time meeting or teleconference may have taken. This makes it more difficult for participants to see the big picture and hear the overall opinions. The multiple threads are confusing and time consuming.
Instead of using e-mail this way, it is much more effective and productive to call a meeting and discuss the issue in detail. Invoke the “two-round rule:” when you see e-mails developing circling back the second time, call a meeting to discuss the issue in further detail and put an end to future lack of productivity caused by all those e-mails. Better yet, call the meeting in the first place.
Viral Efficiency Tip: Top-Down Inbox
Please forward this tip to every e-mailer you know…
Let’s help each other be more efficient.
Here’s the email efficiency tip:
Sort your newly received e-mail from top to bottom or bottom to top. Don’t scroll looking for the “easy” ones – IT WASTES TIME! View each email, either handle it, delete it, or sort it into a folder to work later, and once it is removed from your inbox, THEN move on to the next one in line.
Just think: every time you scroll looking for “treasure” you waste time.
Tired of being on all those mailing lists?
Visit http://www.dmachoice.org and click on “remove my name from those lists.” This complimentary service not only helps you with information on how to remove yourself from telephone solicitation but email solicitation.
The average worker today focuses on a task for about three minutes – that’s it. Then, they’re interrupted or they interrupt themselves. Multitasking is a bunch of hooey. You can’t do two things at once, just like you can’t be in two places at the same time. Yes, you can SHIFT from one task to another, but you can’t do two things at once. Alot of folks think they can… And then they give each task less than 100% attention. What does that say for productivity?
Here is a good post with some background research on the whole subject of multitasking:
http://blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu/teachingblog/2010/03/04/multitasking-revisited/
