Communicating with someone used to be easy. You could just pick up the phone and give them a call, or sit down and write a note. Fast forward a few years, and you have the Internet making it easy to type an electronic message from your computer or your cell phone. This massive change in how we communicate has taken place in a relatively short period. Many agents now tell me that e-mail is their primary means of communicating with most clients.
However, this new communication option has introduced problems into agency workflow. In fact, I believe that sending and receiving e-mail is currently the biggest drain on productivity for many, if not most, agencies. People are surprised when I make this comment. They contend that e-mail has made it quicker and easier, and takes less time than other forms of communication. I agree, but only up to a point.
The problem is that we’re allowing e-mail to manage us instead of learning proactive management of the e-mail that we deal with every day. As with any new form of communication, we need to learn how to use it as an effective tool. Some of the problems I see with e-mail include responding to e-mail as soon as it comes into your inbox and reading an e-mail but, leaving it in our inbox because we don’t know what to do with it,
Because paper and fax have been around as communication options for some time, we’ve learned how to manage them well. We can apply some of those same principles to e-mail. Here are three ideas you can use to help everyone start learning to manage e-mail like any other communication.
- Turn off all notifications for when you receive a new e-mail. There are very few e-mails to an agency require an immediate reply. With alerts turned on every time a new e-mail arrives the natural tendency is to switch over to your e-mail client and read the new e-mail. If you’re in the middle of a difficult task, this will break your concentration, and it will take a few minutes for you to figure where you were and get started again.
- Train yourself to review e-mails on a consistent basis. If you’re not being notified when new e-mails arrive, make sure you go to your inbox on a consistent basis to review the new e-mail received. A friend of mine, a CEO of a large corporation, recently decided that he would only answer e-mail twice a day, late in the morning and before he leaves for work at night.
- David Allen, author of the book Getting Things Done (highly recommended), suggests that when you’re processing your new e-mails you follow this rule: If you can answer the e-mail, or take other action required in two minutes or less, go ahead and answer the e-mail immediately. If it will take longer than two minutes, then move the e-mail to a pending folder to work on later. You then review the pending folder at a predetermined time to complete the work. This allows you to complete easy e-mail and concentrate on more difficult tasks when you have the time.
I’ve followed this advice to try and better manage the large volume of e-mails I receive. I strongly recommend that you begin experimenting with ways to manage e-mail communications better, both for yourself and your staff. You’ll be less frustrated and your clients will experience better service.