Category: Workflow Processing

S.M.A.R.T. Email Credo – The "M"

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Part2Author’s Note: This is the second in a series of articles advocating that people and their organizations adopt the S.M.A.R.T. Email Credo. The Credo focuses on the sender’s role in the email overload problem. Better sender behavior reduces the time spent by and the stress on recipients when handling email. An explanation of the what and why of the Credo can be read at the beginning of Part 1 here.

What does the M stand for?

The M in S.M.A.R.T. stands for message formatting. Utilizing email effectively includes focusing on how to format messages that communicate efficiently.

Email exists in the wide space between hard-copy written communication and real-time verbal communication. Email is often conversational in structure, yet the recipient could be hours or days from responding. Leaving the dichotomy of immediate response expectations aside, emails also lack the non-verbal feedback received during real-time communication – tone and, if in person, body language. Recipient confusion is the result of poor email formatting and minimal surrounding clues due to this asynchronous communication environment.

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S.M.A.R.T. Email Credo – The "S"

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Part1Author’s Note: This is the first in a series of articles advocating that people and their organizations adopt the S.M.A.R.T. Email Credo. The Credo focuses on the sender’s role in the email overload problem. Better sender behavior reduces the time spent by and the stress on recipients when handling email.

Why Does This Matter?

We currently spend 2.8 hours per day handling email (Basex, Inc.). Global use of email is growing 13% per year and will continue to do so through at least 2016 (Radacati Group). We are overwhelmed with email volumes and the situation is getting worse (Wall Street Journal).

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The Boon & Bane of Email – Self-Assessment and Suggestions

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WorldEmailEditors Note: This is a guest article by Bret Beresford-Wood. He is the founder and CEO of RepriseMail. RepriseMail is an app for Outlook that lets people discover, compare and improve how they use email. You can learn more about Bret and RepriseMail at www.reprisemail.com. 

Email. It’s the app we love to hate. We’re overwhelmed by it most days, yet we couldn’t do our work effectively without it!

In our work with busy professionals we have identified five common email productivity killers. They are presented below in a self-assessment format so you can determine if your productivity is suffering from any of them. Also included are some suggested solutions you can use to make email more productive.

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It's Not About Time; It's About Focus

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magnifying_glass_2Time cannot be managed. It ticks inexorably forward. What we do with our time can be managed, and that’s what matters. So it’s not about time, it’s about focusing our effort on the things we want to accomplish.

Another word for accomplishment is productivity. Productivity is getting things done. We like to get things done. It’s makes us feel good – successful. The more successful we feel, the better use we are making of our time.

Productivity results from focused effort, not mere activity. Many people confuse activity with productivity. Activity is about motion itself. Productivity is about forward motion – accomplishment. Activity is often noisy; productivity is generally quiet.

  • Question: How can we be more productive during our distraction-rich and interruption-riddled days?
  • Answer: We can quiet down our physical and mental spaces.

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Disciplines are Hard. Habits are Easy.

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I am loath to post a “New Year’s Resolution” article. Instead, I want to give you something to consider for making any type of change easier. Change Management Arc As a time management coach, it is my job to help people change the way they manage their day. Change is hard because it forces us[…]

You Won't Change…Or Will You?

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Learning a new way to do something – like managing e-mail – necessarily requires changes in behavior. Though self-evident, the difficulty of successfully making those changes in behavior is routinely underestimated.

For example, we all know that managing our e-mail better will lower our stress level and increase our productivity. These are terrific reasons to make the necessary changes. We may even make a conscious decision to better manage our e-mail by adopting a new system. Yet, we always experience internal resistance when the new behaviors required to make the change are introduced. In fact, the resistance is often so great that it significantly diminishes the result, if not undermine the effort altogether.

In short, change is hard. End of story, right? Maybe not.

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Spaghetti on a Plate – Hard-Coded Time Versus Soft-Coded Time

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Spaghetti on a plate.  That’s what many of our calendars – electronic or paper – look like. All of our appointments and lists of to-dos mixed together in one place. This accomplishes one of our goals: to get everything written down in one place. However, it doesn’t accomplish our primary goal: to get everything done in a timely fashion with minimum stress.

Another (food-related) way to look at this issue is to answer these questions:

  • Do you have a kitchen?
  • If so, do you have a silverware drawer?
  • And a junk drawer?
  • Does your calendar look like your silverware drawer or your junk drawer?

This is the fun, interactive example I use during my Focus Pocus: 24 Tricks for Regaining Command of Your Day seminar to get people thinking about how they can be more efficient and productive. The point is that getting everything into one place is the first step in efficient productivity. The second step is having a sorting system for all those things so your brain doesn’t have to constantly sort things before selecting which to do next.

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Finishing – The Second Hardest Thing

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Much is made of starting; it is the hardest thing. We lament its prospect. We’ve named the behavior of non-starting – procrastination – which many consider a condition or a failing or a personality type.

In “Do the Work,” Steven Pressfield’s insightful analysis of this difficulty with starting, he names the force we experience Resistance. Resistance, says Pressfield, is the ever-present enemy within us all that must be battled daily so that results can be produced.

Many have addressed starting and its accomplice, proscrastination.  Here are a few:

Techniques and suggestions for beating procrastination and getting started can be found in those works.

Fast Forward to the End

But what of starting’s silent partner – finishing? Getting our work to closure is often a struggle too. If fact, behind starting, finishing up is the second hardest thing to accomplish.  Whether it’s the actual work or its remnants, failure to lay tasks and projects to their final rest can create just as many problems as failure to start can.

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Gerbils on a Wheel – Making that Wheel Roll Forward

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“Gerbils on a wheel.”  I use this expression frequently when talking with audiences about how we feel after busting hump all day and feeling like nothing got done.  Wouldn’t it be nice to feel like the wheel actually moved forward once in a while?

Breaking Free from the Frame

Like most wheels, the wheel we each run on during the day is held in place on either side of its hub by forks.  Imagine looking down on a bicycle wheel to where the forks attach to the hub.  The wheel spins at the hub and the forks keep the wheel in place.  That’s good on a bicycle because everything works together so that the spinning wheels assist in making the bike move forward.

The gerbil’s wheel is similarly secured but its forks are fixed to the bottom of the cage.  Thus, no amount of spinning will move the wheel forward.  The wheel must break free from the forks for it to roll forward.

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Closing Time – What a Dishwasher Can Teach a Professional

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Closing time – a phrase immortalized by Semisonic in their 1998 pop hit.  The song focuses on that moment late in the evening when the lights of the bar come up signaling that it’s time for the patrons to leave.  But for those working in those environments – bars, restaurants, retail stores – closing time is just the beginning of the end.

After Hours Effort

What I’m talking about is the closing routine that starts after the last customer leaves.  Much of the really hard work begins here – the cleaning, scrubbing, tossing and organizing.  It all needs to be done before the day is really over.  The closing routine is a fundamental part of preparing for the next day, so it’s a process worth perfecting to maximize it’s effectiveness.

The restaurant kitchen is a great analogy for this analysis, primarily because “Dishwasher” was the first title your humble author held in his working career.  The cycle of productivity in a restaurant kitchen can be easily described as (a) prepare to cook, (b) cook, (c) clean up from cooking.  Interestingly, (a) and (c) are interrelated.

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