Managing Email is Managing Time

Coaching Question:

Are you managing email or is email managing you? I do believe this is another of the competencies I mentioned in the introduction of my book that needs to be developed.  Effective email management is a skill!

If you can manage your email 1% better - you’ll create more time to get more work done. With the suggestions to follow, find your 1% edge.

Email can be an effective way of communicating, but I believe and have experienced, that the lack of skill in using it just creates more work. A lot of time is wasted with email.

With that in mind, I recommend you adopt this mindset regarding email:

Email is a tool to manage the virtual experience. It is a tool to work with people through a process to get to a result --(so is text and the phone for that matter).

Key point=>You know there are a lot of expectations when people communicate virtually that are in their head but don’t get put on paper.

Here’s what I mean. How many times have you gotten a request for something from a colleague and there was no indication of when it’s needed - no time and date?  How many emails don’t have enough information in them and therefore requires 3 or 4 more email exchanges just to get from point A to point B.

Because most people do not use email effectively, I recommend developing this skill:

Be more specific, informative, & directive when using and writing emails.

So what is specific, informative and directive? Tell people what to think, how to behave, and what to expect as specifically as possible.

For example - have a format or template that you use on a regular basis. If someone sends a request for something and it doesn’t have all the information, send it back with specific instruction on exactly what you need at the exact time and date you need it.

In some cases you already to do this. When I’m conducting a seminar I ask, “How many of you have your out of office reply on?”  Many raise their hand. Then I ask then to share what it says. Many will say, “I’ll be out of the office on x day returning on x date. If you need assistance call x at extension 3560.”

That is a great example of instructive, informative, and directive. It clearly illustrates tell them what to think – what to expect – how to behave.”

Here’s the overriding point to remember: e-mail like voicemail is a tool to manage a virtual experience and relationship in the context of trying to execute work.  It’s about managing behavior, results, and expectations.

It’s useful to think:  “I’m managing my relationship (or experience) with this person and I’m communicating with them through e-mail, and that’s a part of a relationship.  This person has a personality.  This person has a work style with certain characteristics that are either helping me or hindering me and I need to communicate in a way to coach that person so that I get the results I want in the most efficient and effective way.”

This is an excerpt from the time & organizational management book: Organizational Strategies for the Overwhelmed - available at links provided:

Organizational Strategies for the Overwhelmed - how to manage your time, space, & priorities, to work smart, get results & be happy -  Kindle - The Book - Nook - Audio Book -  The Seminar -  3Cdset - Pdf-ebook - Mp3 Download

Can Too Much Planning Be Time Wasted? - Yep!

A Productivity & Time Management Tip - Don't Over Plan!

Do You Plan Too Much?

Wc: 173

#productivity #timemanagement

If you re’ reading this tip at all it’s probably because you have the personality type that is a natural planner, which of course has great value. Yet, too much of a strength could be used in excess resulting in outcomes we don’t want.

The excess?...sometimes planners can plan too much.  They want to figure out all the steps before they get started. That can lead to what I call “the paralysis of analysis.”  

What to do?

First, recognize and admit that you might be an over planner.

Secondly, decide to create a sweeping overview

Thirdly, plan more specifically the first few steps.

What you’ll discover is that as you move forward you become educated on how to keep moving forward. You’ll probably begin to see that all that previous planning you use to do got tweaked anyway. 

Remember: action brings clarity and that’s what leads me to a very important final tip: over planning in many cases, is really A WASTE of time.  Oh

the irony!

Check out the latest release: Organizational Strategies for the Overwhelmed - how to manage your time, space, & priorities, to work smart, get results & be happy -  Kindle - The Book - Nook - Audio Book -  The Seminar

On Kindle: 

De-clutter Your Life From The Inside - Out

Your Life Through the Lens of Time - The Interview
This Blog - All Things Time Management

Coming Soon - A New Way to Manage Email

Category: Email Management : Source: StepChase Life 

There are so many people that just won’t get out of their email application to manage tasks. While this has been a problem in the past, new solutions like Asana and Flow allow for email and task management to be integrated within the task management solution. In many cases, the person who doesn’t want to go into the task manager can simply respond and check off tasks via email, removing a lot of the friction that can happen in a team environment.

But there’s a new kid on the block that actually lets you manage things from within email — using your email inbox as a task manager. That’s something that many people do already, but in a very impractical way. Mail Pilot looks as if it will add the practicality that’s been missing from the equation.
Mail Pilot is a Kickstarter-funded project that tackles email and task management in a way that is innovative and productive.

What does Mail Pilot do? Well, here’s the word on that straight from the source:

“Mail Pilot is a computer application & service that lets you use your current email accounts in a way that is much more intuitive than today’s email applications. Mail Pilot reimagines email from the ground up, and is built to fit into the workflow of how people use email today.”

But that didn’t answer all of my questions. So I spoke about Mail Pilot with its creators, Josh Milas & Alex Obenauer, shortly after the project went live on Kickstarter.

Mike: I’ve taken a look at Mail Pilot, and it looks really compelling because people who are wanting to manage and/or use their inbox to manage things in terms of productivity and such. Why did you decide to start this thing up and what was the plan behind it?

Alex: So I was in a class in the fall semester and we had to keep a design journal. And a couple of weeks into the semester the professor said that he was going to be doing a check of our journals…and I actually hadn’t written anything in mine yet. So I went home and I tried to come up with a problem that was so big and so problematic that would fill a lot of pages. I chose email because that’s one of my biggest issues — I receive 80 plus emails on average a day, which is less than most people’s average.
And so I started to write about it — and within three pages the entire concept behind Mail Pilot was there. It was very much a thing where I had such an issue with email and really broke it down try to figure out what the essence of email was, and how you would rebuild the client around that essence…ignoring all kind of prior implementations. Then I shared the idea with Josh the next day — and he absolutely loved it. He has very similar problems with email and we had shared our woes together about it.

From there he explained to me that (this) was legitimately something we should act on, that this was much bigger than just changing the way that the two of us use our email, but that this is something that not only do we have the time talents and gifts to make — but something we really should.

Mike:  Now there are a lot of productivity apps out there right now where they tell users to “get out of your inbox”, essentially saying that they shouldn’t be managing from within your email. Did you guys decide to go that route because either you tried stuff other task managers and it didn’t work for you and you just kept going back to managing things from email or do you think it’s just that it’s hard to get people to understand that there is an inbox for email and an inbox for all of their stuff?

Alex: It’s definitely both. You know, one of the biggest time drains for us is translating everything in your inbox into your to-do list and translating them into a calendar…stuff like that. And then trying to put something into your to-do list or put it on to your calendar because you need to follow up with it and then link to that email — it just became a kind of complicated interconnected web of ‘to dos’, events and emails. And it didn’t seem to make much sense.

So we really thought that if you could clear out your inbox, but those messages could still be marked for review, or marked to pop back up — say, reappear in three days — then that would help you severely decrease the clutter in your inbox and you wouldn’t have to spend the time working with a to-do list or a calendar. And the other thing too is that email is a standard. You can’t really get the entire market out of the inbox. Google proved that in a big way with Wave. I really liked what they did with the project but it was clear you couldn’t get people out of their email.

Mike: Right. So you’re raising $35,000 through Kickstarter. Where will that money go to? What’s the plan for those funds?

Josh: The plan is that once we meet that goal is to bring on some additional developers to help us really get the product to market. And their goal would be to then release a beta version by June. That will first go to all of our Kickstarter backers so they can start using it and we can start getting some feedback on it. So essentially, about three months from the end of our campaign the plan would be to release our beta.
Most of the money that we would raise would go to additional development support, ramping up  our server space — because a lot of our features are really services that would take up space. It’s not just folders and stuff that goes into your normal inbox. We have our own data that we have to store with Mail Pilot so we do need an amplified storage space. That’s a pretty heavy cost so that’s where another portion of the money would go to. But then after that, hopefully we can get out of the beta, release to public and go from there.

Mike: I think one of your biggest battles is that there is so many players in this space. What do you think you are going to be able to do to combat that?

Alex: There are definitely a lot of players in the space, but we definitely think that the workflow that fits right into the core of Mail Pilot is just so deliberate to the way that most (if not many) people who have used their email or try to use their email. And we think that’s it. It works so specifically well for people that it would be a very preferred option.

The other thing is that right now we are a two man operation and so we wouldn’t need a majority of the market just to be sustainable. And so we have been excited to see what we’ve gotten so far and we are really excited to see if we can gain enough support to stay sustainable and then to really start spreading the concept around to a lot more people. So far people’s reactions have been so overwhelmingly positive towards the idea in favor over so many other ideas just because it’s so deliberate in the way it really works with your workflow.

How Effective Are You?

Filed under Career Management, Personal Productivity, Professional success, Time Management

In the realm of time management, the word effective is used quite often.  In fact, there is usually a comparison made between effective vs. efficient and of course, both are needed for professional success.

As a reminder, a common definition of effective is doing the right things at the right time to get the best results. However, in this post, I’d like to expand our thinking around the concept of being effective.

I believe increasing our “effectiveness” is more important than ever in creating and maintaining value to our organizations. It’s a must have and do career strategy.


An Expanded View
Consider effectiveness to not only be getting the right things done at the right time, but additionally identifying and  addressing needs, identifying potential solutions, and getting high-impact results.  In essence, effectiveness is beyond just executing tasks.

If this expanded view of being effective is to be realized, then what’s needed in order for this new version to occur?

Consider the following:
1.    Broader knowledge of the players involved in key situations, their roles, their strengths and weaknesses.
2.    A clear understanding of the core needs of the company.
3.    Identification and laser focus on the core needs of internal and external customers and how your role (and that of your team or department) addresses and impacts those core needs.
4.    How does the specifics of your job description contribute to the above.
Compiling the information to the above will craft a bigger picture from which to work to develop and increase your effectiveness. In fact, you may need to volunteer to tweak your job description.  There are a lot of job descriptions out there that are not “value based” job descriptions (meaning they are more about being busy than get high-impact results).

From this big picture access how you go about your work week, what you do with your time and how the tangible results of the day impact this big picture.  If you’re a manager, do the same with your team.

Then ask yourself this question, “Am I getting things done or am I getting things done that also impact the bigger picture.”   Getting things done that impact the greater picture are high impact results.

The irony of productivity is we can go a full work week, get things done and yet have little to no activity that significantly address the big picture.

Coaching Tip: Plan and work with the big picture in mind. Make sure to track and language your performance with this in mind. This is a beneficial strategy in performance reviews.  You can communicate and show how you’ve demonstrated results with more value.

Career Management Bonus Tip: This is also a great strategy for how to communicate your experience in a job interview.