Per My Last Email…
Oh, email, what a love-hate relationship we’ve had over the years. April 23rd is, for whatever reason, National Email Day. For any business owner who’s feeling overwhelmed, reviewing your email policy can help you focus on the important things instead of wasting your time reviewing messages.
Email isn’t always an unproductive time suck…
Hard to believe for anyone younger than Gen X, but we didn’t always have email at work. And when it first came out, it was a useful tool. We weren’t inundated with emails all day, and the ones we received often contained useful information. Email notifications in this context didn’t prevent productivity the way they do now.
Oh email, how I loved thee, let me count the ways:
Send or request information more quickly than picking up the phone (particularly in the days when many people had their own assistants) or walking down the corridor to ask for something in person
Get information to and from a group of people relatively easily instead of trying to get a group of people with different schedules on the phone together
Get notes or information from a meeting you weren’t able to attend
Send less urgent communications
Send communications asynchronously instead of trying to match office hours with someone who’s many timezones away
… but email can also be a productivity killer
Notifications, if enabled, distract you from actual work (email is a communication tool, not work in and of itself)
Sending emails back and forth can often take longer than a phone call would (this is particularly acute when scheduling, if someone doesn’t have a calendar link or you need multiple people together)
Sending emails back and forth because the receiver ignored what you actually wrote
Sending emails back and forth because the meaning was unclear, when again a quick phone call would solve the problem
Being distracted from the content of the email because the tone is misinterpreted or the humor didn’t carry over (yep, I’ve been called on the carpet a few times in my life because clients didn’t get the humor)
Someone replying all to an email to be taken off the list, and then more people reply all to ask that they be taken off the list. (Do not “reply all" as a standard move; use it judiciously.)
Done right, an email policy can help you improve productivity
Most emails are not urgent. Acting as though they are can be gratifying to the ego, but most of the time they don’t help you move your business forward.
I know some people have a hard time with this idea. So, run an experiment for yourself to see how many of your emails need to be responded to right away, let’s say within an hour of receipt). Take a week’s worth of emails or a few days’ worth if that’s more manageable and review them.
If something would have happened to your business if you hadn’t answered the email in an hour or less (like you would have lost a client), consider that urgent.
If an email required no response from you at all, note no response. This could be a newsletter, an update, or something similar.
If the email did need a response from you personally but not within an hour, then it’s not urgent.
If the email needed a response from someone, but it could have been someone else on your team, call it delegation.
Add up all these different instances. What percentage of your emails are truly urgent? Probably less than you thought. Emails that require no response can be shunted to a “read later” folder using email filters. You can also use filters to send delegation emails to the proper person instead of having them come across your desk first.
If you don’t have a lot of urgent emails, you don’t need email notifications. You can use your email filters to avoid having emails that aren’t urgent pinging your inbox. If you really can’t turn them off completely, at least turn them off during the time you have set aside for focused work. (If you don’t have this time set aside, talk to me. We’ll fix that.)
Good email policies
Emails and email notifications are distracting for everyone. Having a “respond within 48 to 72 hours” (unless you have the kind of business where someone has to be on-call all the time) policy can be very helpful to set client expectations and help your staff avoid burnout.
The last thing you want is for your talent to quit on you because they’re overwhelmed with tasks. Making sure they have time to get their work done without being distracted by emails will result in more productivity. Plus, you don’t have to spend time and money replacing an employee because they got burned out.
And to that end, if you want to prevent burnout for your staff too, don’t send out emails to them outside of your established working hours. Having a “you can ignore this if it’s the weekend or after hours” statement on your email is not, I repeat, is not good enough.
If you want to work outside hours from time to time that’s fine. People watch what you do, not what you say, so if you’re sending messages outside business hours they’ll feel compelled to read and respond. Instead, schedule your emails to staff to go out during business hours only.
I also recommend scheduling emails to clients during business hours. If they see an email came through at 2 in the morning, they’ll assume you can be contacted at any time they want. Most vendors and contractors will accept a statement of “ignore if this is on a weekend”. However, you might choose to schedule those emails too so you have a uniform policy of scheduling emails any time you’re writing them outside business hours.
Most people just want an acknowledgement that you received the email, and a simple autoresponder will take care of that. If you schedule your email checking for certain times, you can add that to the autoresponder. When something’s urgent, they’ll call.
Happy emailing!
Recap (tl;dr):
Email is both a productivity booster and a productivity killer, but you can manage your policies and create boundaries around its use to make it more helpful instead of less.
Feel that your job is now entirely emails? Let’s fix that. Schedule a free consultation here.
Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash