5 Ways To Keep Email From Taking Over Your Life

Marsha Egan, CEO of InboxDetox.com and author of Inbox Detox and the Habit of Email Excellence, says that a full inbox is “an immediate source of stress--it reminds you of everything you’re not going to get done.”

According to Egan, the average worker receives 100 to 200 emails per day. Even if you only spend a minute addressing each one, that’s two to three hours on email alone.

To fight back against the inbox black hole, she says, we don’t need to pay for fancy plugins or shiny apps. ”The issue is self-management,” Egan explains. “Outlook and Google already have built-in tools, but few people use them. The key is to manage yourself and your email habits rather than hoping technology will do it for you.”

That sounds reasonable, but how do we do it? Below, Egan shares her top five tips for minimizing an overwhelming inbox and maximizing productivity during the day.

Read the rest.

8 Email Mistakes You Make

Good thoughts here from Tim Challies:

• You Check Email All Day
• You Use Your Best Hours To Check Email
• You Use Email For High Priority Communication
• You Use Email As Your To-do List
• You Compose or Reply When You Don't Need To
• You Get a Notification for Every New Email
• You Have A Million Emails In Your Inbox
• You Use Email Instead of ________

Click over to read his explanations.

One Small Tip That Might Be a Game-Changer For Your Productivity

Tony Schwartz: 

What’s the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning, before you even brush your teeth? Is it checking the e-mail that’s flooded into your inbox overnight? Does the pull feel increasingly irresistible, even Pavlovian? Do you get so immersed in responding to other people’s agendas that 30 minutes can go by before you even look up?

Here’s a radical proposal: Don’t check your e-mail at all tomorrow morning. Turn it off entirely. Instead, devote a designated period of uninterrupted time to a task that really matters.

For more than a decade, the most significant ritual in my work life has been to take on the most important task of the day as my first activity, for 90 minutes, without interruption, followed by a renewal break. I do so because mornings are when I have the highest energy and the fewest distractions.

I’m doing it right now, but in all honesty, it’s gotten tougher in the last several years. My attention feels under siege, like yours probably does.

For the last 10 years, my colleagues and I have helped companies like Google, Genentech, Coca-Cola, Green Mountain Coffee and Facebook fuel sustainable high performance by better meeting the needs of their employees. Far and away the biggest work challenges most of us now face are cognitive overload and difficulty focusing on one thing at a time.

Whenever I singularly devote the first 90 minutes of my day to the most challenging or important task – they’re often one and the same — I get a ton accomplished.

Read the rest.

Why You Should Never Deal With Conflict Via Online Mediums

Brian Howard:

Through experience (and pain) I have come to realize how powerful online messaging is and how dangerous it can be to both work relationships and friendships. Understanding these three principles will keep you from wrecking relationships with online messages.

• Conflict through Online Messaging is Unwise
• Online Messages can be Easily Misinterpreted
• Online Messaging is Fast, Permanent, and Dangerous

Click over to read his explanations.

Don't Send That Angry Email

As a rule I never confront over email.  Been burned to many times in the past by doing it myself and also being on the receiving end.  Not good.  Nonverbal communication is too important and relationships are too important to not value the benefit of nonverbals.

If it is at all emotional, don't deal with it over email.  It usually will not go well.

Here is a helpful post along similar lines from Michael Hyatt.

(HT:  T-Wax)

True Confidentiality is Rare These Days

Darryl Dash:

I was about to hit "send" on an email last week when I paused. The email was fine for the recipients, but what if it was forwarded by one of the recipients? It contained confidential information, so I saved it as a draft and decided to think about it for a while.

Around that time I began listening to the audiobook version of Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul. The author, Howard Schultz, writes about a confidential email that was forwarded to a Starbucks gossip site. He writes:

Staring at the screen, I was speechless. Not because my criticisms were now public. What upset me, what felt like a blow to my gut, was the leak. I could not imagine who would do such a thing.

It was nothing less than a betrayal.

One of the lessons: Never assume that something you write in an email will stay confidential. Assume it will get out there, and write accordingly. As the book says, "Nothing is confidential."

Read the rest.

Is Email Becoming Obsolete?

Thom Rainer has done some research that might lend one to think so.  His article in quite interesting in terms of how we communicate and the mode we choose to use based on generation.

Never Correct Someone Over Email

Amen, amen, amen....

More Wisdom for Email

Seth Godin:

1. Change your settings so that email from you has a name, your name, not a blank or some unusual characters, in the from field. (ask a geek or IT person for help if you don't know how).
2. Change your settings so that the bottom of every email includes a signature (often called a sig) that includes your name and your organization.
3. Change your settings so that when you reply to a note, the note you're replying to is included below what you write (this is called quoting).
4. Don't hit reply all. Just don't. Okay, you can, but read this first.
5. You can't recall an email you didn't mean to send. Some software makes you think you can, but you can't. Not reliably.
6. Email lives forever, is easy to spread and can easily show up in discovery for a lawsuit.
7. Please don't ask me to save a tree by not printing your email. It doesn't work, it just annoys the trees.
8. Send yourself some email at a friend's computer. Read it. Are the fonts too big or too small? Does it look like a standard email? If it doesn't look like a standard, does this deviation help you or hurt you? Sometimes, fitting in makes sense, no?

And a bonus tip from Cory Doctorow, who gets more email than you and me combined: When you go on vacation, set up an autoreply that says, "I'm on vacation until x/x/2010. When I get back, I'm going to delete all the email that arrived while I was gone, so if this note is important, please send it to me again after that date."

How To Have A Little Fun With Email Scammers

This was pretty funny. We all have gotten the emails from Nigerian Christians who want to give us money or something like that, right? This guy has some fun this the emailer. I think we should all do this and perhaps it will decrease the amount of spam in our email.

(HT: @imonk)

As A Habitual Email Checker, I Found This Convicting

Matt Perman:

Let’s say that you are working in an office or room at your home. You realize that tomorrow is garbage day. So you empty your trash sitting beside you, go through the rest of the house and do the same, and then sit back down to work.

You jot some notes down on a piece of paper and decide you don’t need them. You throw the paper away, into the trash can you just emptied. Do you then empty the trash can again right away? Nobody would do that. You’d never get anything done. Instead, you let the trash collect, and then empty it again at a designated time.

Yet, when it comes to email, many of us insist on “taking out the trash” continually. This amounts to a continual interruption. You wouldn’t take the trash out every time you throw something away. Likewise, don’t check your email every time something new comes in. Best of all, shut it down between those times if possible, or at least minimize the window and turn off the bell.

(Nuance: I know that there are occassions when it does pay off to keep processing new messages right away, such as when you are in the middle of a conversation thread with some folks. But I’m saying: Don’t make continual checking your ongoing, default, general mode of opeation.)

Wisdom for Email

Today in our staff meeting our executive pastor asked us to come up with a collective list of rules to generally follow when dealing with email. Here is the list we came up with followed by some comments from me:

1. Don't confront people over email.

Non-verbal communication is too important in confrontation and tone cannot be interpreted well over email. Ask yourself if you are wanting to confront over email because you are being cowardly and have a sinful bent toward the fear of man. One push back on this principle is that when writing an email you can collect your thoughts in a cohesive way for better communication. I would say if you feel this way, write your thoughts on a pad of paper with bullet points and bring it to your confrontation appointment.


2. Use email to work on your grammar.

Text speak (lol, c ya, etc.) can merge into our email, email can merge into our more formal writing. Don't believe this? Ask my wife, she teaches graduate school and can testify to this fact. Scary, I know.


3. Work to have a balance between email and personal contact.

I am bad at this. I have found that I would rather sit in my office and fire off a quick email to the guy in the office next door as opposed to just popping over and saying something quickly. I know it feels efficient in the short term, but I wonder about the long term effects. If we are not careful we breed a culture of isolation that is detrimental to our essential nature of God's image bearers, created for communities of love.


4. Be professional over email.

Granted, for most of us email is not a professional medium of communication, but why not raise the bar?


5. Use subject lines.

Again, I am bad at this but working on it. It's much easier to find old emails this way, for you and the one who receives. It also helps emails not get pushed to spam folders and gives your reader a sense of your intentions right off the bat.


6. Don't multi-task too much with email.

I have been burned bad in the past by having too many emails flying around with different windows open and hitting reply when I should have hit forward. What a horrible feeling! It's like you want to scratch and claw your way into the computer after hitting send to pull that one back out. Sadly, you can't. I did this one time in college when I was wanting to forward something to JT about our religion professor, but rather sent it to the religion professor himself. The email was less than kind. The next day in class he was a good sport about it and thought it was funny, but made fun of me in front of the whole class. Mortifying.


7. Don't email your spouse a love letter, or better yet, anything to anybody that is emotionally meaningful.

Use your own handwriting. It's way more personal.


8. Hesitate before you hit reply all.

Do they all really need to receive your reply?


9. Don't forward cheesy emails with winged angels and dancing bears.

Barf.


10. Learn people's style.

Some people just don't like email. Serve them by not trying to force them into your style and then being angry when they don't reply to your email. Call or go and see them. This is most loving. Also, don't be offended when you write a four paragraph book email and they only reply with two sentences. They might not have had time to reciprocate with equivalent size and would rather just talk on the phone.


11. Use blind copy (BCC:) when sending to a large group.

If you don't you could expose people to spam from insensitive spammers who like to collect email addresses to add people to random lists.

Email Can Be The Devil

Ever had that horrific feeling after you hit "send" on an email and wished so bad you could reel that one back in due to something wrong with it? I have.

Seth Godin gives some very helpful questions to ask before you hit "send" on your next email. Print it out and put it next to your computer.