When I got my first e-mail account in 1997, I was so paper-minded I printed every incoming message. Today, that would cost me 1,000 sheets of paper a week.

Not only does the contemporary business owner get as much junk mail per day as her mother did in a month, but our inboxes are also overflowing with e-newsletters, social networking updates, event invitations in quadruplicate, and notes from well-meaning friends and family who think e-mail is the best thing that ever happened to small talk.

You feel like hiring an extra secretary just to deal with it.

Before you post an ad for that position, though:

• Get your spam filter up to date. Consider requiring self-verification from first-time senders.
• Get rid of defaults that “pass” anything addressed to “…@[your Web site]” irrespective of prefix. This will make it harder for spam mailers to “hit” your box. Don’t worry about losing messages; human senders who don’t double-check your address upon receiving “undeliverable” replies probably weren’t that interested to begin with.
• Don’t post direct e-mail links online; write your address as “me[at]mycompany.com,” or require senders to manually copy a graphic image before the message goes through. (Don’t, however, use lengthy e-mail forms with a dozen required fields. They look so time-consuming that they scare off legitimate senders.)
• Learn to use the “rules” function on your e-mailbox. See if it can be programmed to completely delete certain messages.
• Think twice before signing up for “daily digests” on social networking sites and discussion boards. They may take more time than you can spare, especially if (like me) you hate deleting things unread.
• Also think twice before signing up for e-newsletters. Ask yourself honestly which ones you’ll really read or find useful.
• For those messages that do reach your inbox, immediately delete any not worth following up on. Sort the others into folders—for example, “Answer Promptly,” “Newsletters to Read Friday Afternoon,” “Relevant to Project XY”—and deal with one category at a time. Your work will progress faster and more efficiently.
• Try not to check your box more than twice a day. Constantly incoming messages interrupt your flow of thought and distract from the task of the moment.
• Leave the “unsubscribe” link alone when you receive a “newsletter” you never requested. As often as not, “unsubscribing” only signals that your mailbox is active and therefore fair game.
• Finally, remember that in most cases nothing terrible will happen if you do miss a message.

E-mail is a wonderful servant. Just don’t let it enslave you!

Katherine Swarts is a guest blogger for EggStream Marketing, offering business tips and time management advice. Her expert writing services are a part of her business, Spread the Word Commercial Writing. “Anything Worth Writing Is Worth Writing Right”
http://www.spreadthewordcommercialwriting.com
Certified WBE

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Comment Reply via Email Improvements « Blog « WordPress.com 15 May 2009 … For the space stripping issue on tags for post via email please contact support and we’ll track down what’s going on. … en.blog.wordpress.com/…/comment-reply-via-email-improvements/ – Cached – Similar -
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Post to your blog using email « WordPress Codex
Read the instructions under Post via e-mail at the bottom of the page. …. WordPress will use the Subject line of your email for the title of the … of the email will be used as the content of the post, with common HTML tags stripped. …
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Posterous launches easy post tagging via email – The Official … Posterous launches easy post tagging via email ….. Anyway, if Posterous’ tags become WordPress’ tags that would make the Autopost feature complete, IMHO. …
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… such as when sending an email from some cell phones or via a MMS-Email gateway … Welcome to Post by Email, the easiest way to blog!

By Vikas Nehru

In 1971, when the first email was sent, a future of unimagined potential was born. Today, email is everywhere with studies estimating that there are over 1.3 billion email users worldwide sending about 210 billion emails every day. 

In addition to widespread use for personal communication and collaboration at work, consumers rely heavily on email to interact with businesses. Email as a customer service channel now represents 19 percent of all customer interactions, according to Aberdeen Group analyst Sumair Dutta. Particularly for non-urgent requests, consumers prefer using email because it’s more convenient, accessible and timely than phone service.

While email management solutions can offer an opportunity to transform the quality and efficiency of customer service, too often organizations perpetuate the inadequacy of service processes and policy that they’ve adopted for phone support and apply them to email. The result is huge backlogs of unanswered inquiries, missed service levels and unhappy customers. Rather than replicating these inefficiencies, organizations must look for solutions that enable changes in the process and policies, that lend themselves better to email customer service. Businesses need to more effectively leverage email management system so that the technology — not the agent — handles the bulk of the time-consuming work.

In the typical company, the delivery process for phone support involves three technologies, usually offered by disparate vendors:

• Route: Routing calls to the appropriate agents is the domain of traditional ACD/CTI vendors, which accounts for about 5 percent of a call’s total handling time. 
• Capture: Agents manually log calls using a CRM system, which accounts for about 15 percent of the call’s cost. They spend an additional 5 percent of their time in phone “wrap up” activities. 
• Resolve: Agents often rely on a knowledge management tool to help them resolve inquiries. Despite this tool, agents usually spend a lot of time understanding the customers’ questions, hunting around for possible answers and (we hope) finally delivering useful responses. 

The total handling time for an average phone call is in the range of 6-8 minutes. More than six additional minutes are devoted to the resolution process.

When the time it takes to complete these steps are compared to an optimized email service implementation, the difference in terms of time for interaction and resolution are staggering:

• Route: No email agent says “please hold, while I transfer you to the right department.” An optimized email management system automates this process, automatically analyzing emails and route them to the right departments or the right agents, who are skilled to answer the inquiries. 
• Capture: Email is self-documenting. An optimized email management system automatically categorizes emails and attaches the solutions used to resolve the issues so that agents don’t have to spend extra time in wrap-up activities like they do in the phone world. 
• Resolve: An optimized email system intelligently analyzes email content and uses that interpretation to automatically present agents with the most likely answer, including information from other, desperate enterprise systems. Agents only need to clarify the inquiry, evaluate the suggestion and send the answer on its way. 

With a side-by-side comparison, it’s easy to see how businesses can significantly reduce both interaction and resolutions times with an optimized email management solution. Individual inquiry times can drop by as much as four minutes while resolution times can be contained to only two minutes. This enables agents to manage approximately twice the number of emails per day as phone calls, dramatically reducing contact center overhead. With email management that re-engineers the inquiry process, businesses can deliver a level of high-performance customer service that exceeds customer expectations at significantly lower cost.

Bottom line: If you are implementing email as a customer service tool, don’t perpetuate the status quo.

I just realized that I never quite got back to posting the email processing technique I learned. In the crush of business recently, it got left behind. I have a moment this morning. Let me share as I prep for my day.

Email Management Using Outlook

1) Set up Categories for all of your clients. I also include the following:

• In Progress – For work which is going on longer than one day which you have already begun response to.
• Admin – for any official notices or departmental practices which you need to hang on to
• Keepers – for any of the rare gems of emails which come through you will want to keep (usually the good office humor)

2) Set up inbox folders, one for each category you have set up. (All of this is kind of basic, but it sets up the system).

3) The system itself – keep your inbox clear. That’s the goal. Think of it as an adult game of Tetris, but you want to keep the inbox completely clear.

When a piece of email arrives, open it and read it from the attitude of playing ‘keep away’. Ask yourself, “Whose problem does this need to become next?”  Need info from someone else to draft the response? Pass it along to them. Is there an action item that someone on the team needs to take care of? Pass it along to them. This step is involved in legitimately moving the task along the system until it gets to the person who provides the information.

Once the email is tasked, asked, forwarded, etc., tag it by the Category of the client it belongs to and then immediately drop it into the corresponding Client folder.

If the email is something that you need to take care of, figure out when you need it done by and how long it should take to do it given an inconvenient amount of work interrupting it. Set a Follow Up reminder flag on the email to remind you about it given about 1.5x the amount of time you think it will take you to complete it given an inconvenient simultaneous workload.  (Think that between phone calls, other emails, bosses walking by, and last-minute meetings you can give the answer to the email within two hours of working? Set the reminder to go off three hours before the email response is due).  Then tag it by the appropriate client and then move it into the In Progress folder, and move on to the next email.

If the email is a confirmation, acknowledgment, or a conversation you are being Copied on without needing your action, assign it to the right client category and immediately drop it into the client folder.

Continue processing the emails until everything is out of your inbox. Note that it’s not just sorting, there’s action taken on every single email you process, including setting up reminders which are your safety net… if you haven’t gotten to the email by the time the effort is ‘due’ you’ll get a nag from Outlook with just enough time on it to send you into a panic and yet still have time to hopefully get it done.

Processing Times vs. Working Times

Once you get the inbox clear, so they tell me, you can set up specific periods of the day which you use to actually process through all of your emails. The start of the day, right after lunch, and just before going home are three good touch points. If you get a lot of email, you need about an hour to process it all. If you get less email, less time needed.

Process the emails at those times. Clear out that inbox at the beginning, middle, and end of the day.

Then, once the inbox is empty, go through the In Progress folder and prioritize the emails you’ve got in there. I’ve heard recommendations to start with the small stuff first and clear out the volume of emails you can. This is a good tip for those of us who constantly struggle with lots of emails for work.  I’ve also heard recommendations to start with a major, substantial task and work solidly on it to get it out of the way. Once you’ve reached the point at which you are Working the In Progress pile, you should already have gotten rid of a majority of the messages in your inbox, so this should represent a closer look at the To Do list of the day, so prioritize however your press of business dictates.

Of course, there’s a catch

Emails don’t always allow for time to ignore them. As you’re working, you need to pay attention to the popup boxes with the teaser text from any new emails which arrive. If it’s important, jump right on it. If it’s unimportant, either delete it right away or else tag & bag it, categorizing it by client and then dropping it into the client’s folder.  Whatever you can’t get to, process when you hit one of your processing times.

How’s it working so far?

For me, this model of immediate attention during a more active sorting or processing phase helped me to increase my email handling capacity.  However, the sheer volume of email and tasks I get still outpaces this method by far. Also, because I’m in launch-prep mode, I have been spending a lot of time herding cats away from my desk, so in the last 2 days my uncategorized emails jumped back up to 225+, and that’s with the processing I’ve been able to do.

At least I’m more efficient at responding now. And the bigger chunks are more easily visible. So there’s some improvement. I’ll see about stepping it up even another notch. But there really does come a point at which there just isn’t enough time or energy in the day to get to everything you need to, and when every day brings you the work of multiple days, sometimes you just lose the ability to keep track of anything beyond one or two projects at a time, so you juggle as best you can and hope that some problems will resolve themselves by being ignored (hey, it happens once in a while).

It’s been a little bit since I posted about the ongoing (over)work issues. Time for an update and some resolution.

Speaking to my boss was the right thing to do, naturally. It took a little bit for us to understand each other, that I normally handle a lot of workload as it is, and because of that if I were to warn every time I got close to my threshold it would be a daily kind of occurrence. She understands now that I do work so close to my threshold, so when I do raise a flag, it’s not just rumblings, it’s a call for assistance or at the very least attention to the problem is needed.

I even ended up speaking with HR, and the company is responding to my complaints positively. They are acknowledging that there is a need for some kind of staffing increase in the department, and HR came into our departmental meeting and asked us for our general pain points. I think it was telling that a lot of what we had to say addressed solving problems, not just symptoms… and the work volume is partly symptomatic of other things. I’ll leave those well enough alone, but it was very nice to be listened  to. We’ll see as it comes down to implementation, but the team has the right ideas, so the battle is more than half won.

Email patterns.

Interestingly enough, a coworker watched me having my panic attacks at work for a week and shared his method of dealing with his email volume. Over this past weekend (labor day weekend, too) I worked my way through the email pile using his method. I think it can work, but it’s a bit more labor intensive up front. I’m still not sure if it will work as well with my client load, but I’m going to try it.

Before I get into the method itself, let me explain how I’ve been working to try and keep up. Typically I have categories in Outlook for each client. When new mail comes in, I scan it  briefly to do triage on when I need to respond to it. Then I let it go uncategorized in the general email bucket if I need to get to it later, or else I take care of it if it’s an emergency, and archive the email once it’s done. Once a week (used to be Monday, then became Friday because I went a whole week without having the time to do it) I sort through the remaining ‘uncategorized’ emails, assigning them category codes and putting their tasks into a formal To-Do list. Every day, I prioritize off of that To-Do list, plus any new emergency items which come up during the day.

The system is actually tried and true for me… but with a client load of 4-6 active projects/clients… and no maintenance work. Project managers generally work on projects… items with a definite ending point. Wham, bam, thank you ma’am.  Maintenance clients… that’s a whole ‘nother ball of wax. Can’t predict their needs. Can’t ignore their requests. Hard to prioritize their emergencies, because when a Maintenance client has a Maintenance issue, you need to react quickly since there’s generally at least one someone on the other end of the line who can’t continue their work until you accomplish yours.

So while my system worked and worked well for a project-based environment, a hybridized project/maintenance environment was swamping me. Drowning in emails.

Counting emails?

The internet geek in me, however, started to note that Outlook keeps count of emails when you display them via category. I started to notice that by the end of each week, I had a chunk of emails which had been weeded through to address the important stuff, discard the junk, and represented each week a body of client requests which needed some measure of attention and time to process into tasks and assign out to the team, to do research on, to follow up with communications and consolidated documentation. They weren’t critical tasks, or they would have been done already. They weren’t throwaway tasks, or they would have been deleted when they came in. These were the body of work, the unglamorous, the regular, the mundane.

I tracked them. Not by any academic rigor, just because that number of emails in the Uncategorized bucket was always there. I’d plug away one night overtime, and it would go down by a quarter or a third, and then by the end of the next day, the number was right back up where it had been.  Unscientifically, of course, I came up with the following rough trends.

Daily emails

Every day, I receive approximately 100 emails of all kinds, of which a quarter are threads of conversations started by those “uncategorized” mundane work emails as I did research on issues and follow ups on items. About 10-15 a day are emergencies needing immediate attention and resolution that interrupt everything else and sometimes derail an entire day’s work. Leaving about 60 emails a day of that ‘uncategorized’, mundane work coming in.

Some of those emails get done quickly. 5 minutes, tops. About 10 of them are the quick kinds, usually. Some of them are the really sticky kinds of issues which once you start, that’s what you’re going to be doing for hours, and it will probably involve team meetings and emails and efforts which just can’t get resolved in a single sitting by a single person. Another 5 of those kinds of emails a day, and to be fair, a lot of the issues remain the same, but the sticky emails generate more sticky emails the next day, etc., until there’s resolution on the items. (Several items I tackled when I started at the job. Sticky emails take months to resolve, usually, so they generate constant work until they’re done.)  The rest of the emails take, on average, about 15-30 mintues to resolve, between reviewing the issue, identifying the resources for the job, communicating the client needs to the resources, putting in the right tasks into our internal task management system, communicating back to the client. (Tomorrow those become the 5 minute email types as the clients respond).

Let’s do the math on the rough numbers, and we’ll see why things get out of hand.

60 “uncategorized” emails a day.
10 of them take 5 minutes to do, or one hour of work, roughly, spaced out along the day.
45 emails taking, oh, let’s be generous and say 15 minutes each.  11.25 hours of work right there.
And 5 ’sticky’ emails which can eat up hours apiece. Let’s be kind and say that after the inital sticky issue is identified and progress begins, it takes about an hour to move each sticky email to the next sticky stage. So that’s 5 hours.

17.25 hours of work, just generated by emails.

Every day.

Reality speaks

Now, the numbers don’t work out that way all the time. But even if my estimates are doubled, that’s still more than 8 hours of work for the day just for emails. Not every month has been that busy. I’d love to actually figure out what the real email timing is. It’s the primary form of business communication now, which is good because it becomes a project’s documentation.  But when email gets out of control, it can quickly swamp your work life.

So this past weekend, I manned up and worked through the weekend, catching up as best I could. Yesterday things actually felt like I was continuing to make progress, so the momentum from the weekend helped. Of course, the price I’m paying for all of this is that I’m running on empty personally, but if there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, then so be it. Sometimes, the only way out is through.

In this time of information overload, it’s easy to be driven to distraction. Even if you don’t realize it’s happening. The tools that were thought to be increasing your productivity, are actually bogging you down and killing your focus. Studies show that if you turn your attention away from the task at hand to read an incoming email or text message, it can take you as much as 5 to10 minutes to regain focus and get back into the flow of the task you left. Now multiply that times the number of emails that come in on a daily basis. How much more focused and efficient would you be if left uninterrupted? Stop the old world thought of multi-tasking and be intentional about working with focus. You will get more done and do it better!

5 Quick steps to taking control of your office email and boosting productivity

1. Don’t check your email first thing in the morning
2. Mobile devices – Turn setting to ring for phone calls only and make sure email/message alert is on silent
3. Turn on your email auto-responder (Microsoft Outlook has the out of office assistant) with a carefully crafted message and your phone number letting people know that you won’t be able to access your email until later.  If they have an emergency they can reach you by phone. 99% of your emails are not urgent, but we treat them like they are.
4. Turn off the email alerts and minimize your email screen
5. Choose just 2 or 3 times during the workday for checking and answering emails –Use the following steps to sort your new mail

-Delete the junk
- Answer the important
- Put the other mail in a follow up folder for  your last email session of the work day.

In a typical day I receive between 100 and 120 emails on my business account (not counting my “junk” accounts), and I send somewhere around 40 or 50.  I assume I’m pretty typical for my business and my role within our company.  Pretty much every one of those emails constitutes a legal record of my communications with someone.  To say that someone can get fired over the contents of a single email doesn’t solicit 1 batted eyebrow these days.  Why then do only about 10% of organizations have in place a formal email management strategy?

AIIM reported on a study in this week’s Infonomics magazine that speaks to the risks of email management (more specifically the risks of the lack of email management).  According to the report, the good news is that the problems are understood.  I think that the best news is that the problem is also easily managed with technology, such as our Email Management module, a part of our new Emerald Green Office Suite.  This product is a backoffice server product that plugs directly into a Microsoft Exchange server, allows you to configure your records management rules, and voila! all email traffic is now managed and treated as business records.

Going paperless IS possible – start here to learn more.

Yesterday’s training with Marsha Egan was excellent! If you missed it, catch it now at Marnie’s Friends. This comment came in after the show:

“Email Detox E-training was excellent! The steps given were great considering that one is already starting from zero messages. What suggestions can you give…for one within an existing inbox full of messages (hundreds)?”

I forwarded this note to Marsha Egan who responded with the following excerpt from her book, Inbox Detox. —————————————————————————————

Organize Your Email

The Cleansing Except from Inbox Detox by Marsha EganWe’re not done. Knowing the methods to keeping your inbox under control is a great start. These 12 Steps pave the way for complete efficiency and productivity with this new technological tool. It paves the way to your future success. But first, we have one big “cleansing to do…”

If you are like many of my clients, you didn’t buy Inbox Detox because your inbox was empty… Most likely, you have many items in that inbox.

So before you can get into a daily regimen that honors the 12 steps, you need to “cleanse” that inbox, once and for all.

The next action then, is to plan to get your current inbox down to zero. This Inbox Detox program won’t work well without you taking this very important step.

Don’t groan. Having many items in your inbox is actually an advantage — it will create a focused effort on emptying that inbox that will help you actually engrain the habits that will maintain inbox control in the future!

And here is the method that will work.

Set a date. The best way to get this done is to set a target date.

Here is some help in setting up your target date. Using the two-minute rule as your guide, take the number of e-mails you currently have in your inbox and multiply them by two minutes. This is the maximum amount of time you’ll need to budget. We believe you’re safe cutting that time in half, then half again, because many of the e-mail messages will take only seconds to handle.

Divide that number by 60 minutes, and you will have an estimate of how many hours it will take you to empty that inbox. We suggest that you break this effort into no more than one hour segments.

So, using the formula above, if you have 250 e-mails, the most time it should take you to empty your inbox will be 500 minutes, or eight hours. The reality is many of those items won’t take you two minutes, but eight hours would be the maximum amount of time. Our better guess would be that it might take you two to four hours… So you might want to plan an hour a day for the next three or four days as your target.

Realizing that this “cleansing” is an investment in your professional and psychological future, give yourself some space, and don’t try to do it all at once or it will drive you crazy.

Some people have devoted an hour a day, every other day until they achieved their zero goal. Others devoted a half hour every morning. Still others set aside time daily on consecutive days. Do what works best for you, but don’t stop until you get to zero.

Caution! Practice the right habits. As you do your Inbox Detox sweep, it is important that you use the e-mail two-minute rule, file things in folders, and set diaries as you would after you have reached the zero items in your inbox. Apply the steps you learned in the 12 Step Program.

As my niece, Alison, once corrected me when I admired her piano practice, saying “Practice makes perfect” she stated, “No, Auntie Moo, Perfect practice makes perfect.” Avoid being romanced into handling any item that will take you more than two minutes. Avoid unnecessary scrolling. Avoid working on low priority stuff.As you do so, you will engrain toxic habits rather than change them.

Some people have had success creating a temporary review folder, and moving everything from the inbox to that folder. They achieved an empty inbox immediately. This method can work, only if you commit to going into that temporary review folder, and sorting the e-mail messages contained therein by your target date.

There is a silver lining in this… Emptying that e-mail inbox is actually a great exercise in affirming the new habits you will develop for handling your e-mail. Because it is a concentrated effort, you will learn what you repeat, thereby shortening the amount of time to engrain new habits.


Set a target date, right now, by which your inbox will be totally empty. Make the target date realistic, and commit to it.


So, when will your inbox be completely empty?_________________________
———————————————————————————–

I hope this helps!  I love you and care about your life, work, time and relationships.  My goal is to support you as you make healthy lifestyle choices. I appreciate experts like Marsha Egan who can come alongside and help us!  Learn more about Marsha at her website LeverEdgeCoach.org

I just returned from a little trip and, to my delight, my email bin was organized, welcoming and easy for me to get back on top of. I remember, just a few years ago, returning from a similar trip to over 1,000 messages, all piled up in one receiving area.

If you have not yet mastered the art of managing lots of email, join us for…

Live Training Thursday July 16, 2009 InBox DeTox with author Marsha Egan 1-2PT, 2-3MT, 3-4CT, 4-5ET Call (646) 727-2510 OR Click to Listen Online (Note show time above.)

Download two helpful reports here:
10 Best Practices of a Positive Email Culture
10 Top Ways to Reduce Email & Reclaim Your Productivity

Twitter is hot.

Twitter is so hot and talked about that a lot of email marketers are starting to incorporate their company Twitter links into email.  However, I wonder if they are incorporating their Twitter links because they have to or because they want to.  Regardless of the reason,  I plan to do an evaluation of these Twitter accounts.  What?  What I mean is that I plan to visit these links and get a gauge on the activity on the account.

To me,  it would seem silly to incorporate a Twitter link in your promotional email only for the user to find out that the account has very little activity and provides little value to the user.

So watch for some posts in the coming days/weeks.

Technorati Tags:
twitter, social media, email marketing, email strategy, share to social, twitter, twitter.com, email, email management

Hello, here’s a quick note about how to not be drowned in email

It is extraordinary how much stuff piles into my inbox everyday. I used to go through it all like looking for jewels in a quarry.

The good information is out there, it can sometimes be a bit like the proverbial needle in the virtual haystack to find however.

I learned from another Internet Marketer to unsubscribe from any list that is not delivering top quality information, and from lists that just send sales pitches constantly. After a while there will be more, keep looking at the content, unsubscribe if it is not delivering. It will keep coming, don’t worry.

When you find something that truly interests you. Make you decision and run with it.

Then just work the system.

Enjoy the net

Jeff

Currently, about 8% of the nation’s hospitals use electronic medical records management and 17% of physicians Although growth has been slow due to the high initial cost, trends are shifting to computer based medical records management systems. The number of users is increasing, because it has been proven that having an electronic medical records system in place improves patient care. Transitioning to electronic medical records can be done cost effectively by minimizing the high initial investment.

When transitioning to an electronic medical records management system cost effectively, it is suggested that a medical facility divide their on site records. There should be two groups: patients who need to be seen with follow up appointments within the next six to twelve months, and discharged patients who will not require follow up appointments. Since it is estimated that the cost to covert to a digital image is $15.00 to $20.00 per patient chart, the most cost effective transition plan is to convert the group that will be seen in the next six to twelve months to electronic files.

The discharged patients’ files that will not be seen again should be stored. A box of patient charts can be stored at an approximate cost of $3.00 per year vs the cost to convert an individual patient chart to image of $15.00 to $20.00. These less active patient charts should be converted to image more selectively, upon demand. When they are being converted to image, the chart should be reviewed and be discriminatingly converted in case some of the information is not necessary. These medical records management solutions will ease the investment, and allow for a well-organized transition to the use of digital records.

There are many records Management Company available today with experienced with the unique challenges of medical records management. They are familiar with the confidentiality and compliance rules for medical records, and can enhance the productivity and cost efficiency for a hospital or medical practice.

A new report from MessageLabs holds more bad news for legitimate email marketers: spam levels are now about the 85% mark. This is a 19-month high and not good news for email marketers. The higher the spam levels go the more resistant consumers are to opening any type of advertising message. (Full story: http://www.bizreport.com/2009/04/messagelabs_spam_reaches_19_month_high.html)

One technology that can help fight spam, but working at the wrong side of the problem.

Estava procurando alguns textos sobre gestão de inbox, e achei este que adapto e traduzo.

Se você não começou a usar o Twitter, não comece.   São emails sem proposito tomando asteróides.   Morri de rir quando vi um post de Robert Scoble no dia 19 intitulado “Produtividade para cima 200%, Twitter para baixo”.   E-mail é o maior causador de interrupções na vida moderna.   No mundo digital, criando tempo, portanto, minimizando emails.

O método mais rápido de controlar o impulso do email é estabelecer resposta automática que avise que irei checar emails no máximo duas vezes ao dia.

Um exemplo de como lotear tarefas (performando como tarefas com hora marcada, quando normalmente você deixa acumular), e seu sucesso com esta técnica depende de dois fatores:

1. Sua habilidade em treinar os demais a respeitar estes intervalos,

2. Sua habilidade de se auto-disciplinar a seguir suas próprias regras.

Pense que seu chefe não entre nesta? Você ficaria surpreso. Este é um exemplo de alguém que viu o seminário SXSW- Segredos de Fazendo Mais com Menos no Mundo Digital. Os dois emails que me mandou tinham um pouco de edição de tamanho.

Oi Pedro,

Isto é o que peguei da sua apresentação e pus em pratica.

Mandei um email para cada um da minha divisão informando que verificarei emails apenas as 11 horas e as quarto da tarde.

Inclui o email abaixo:

Ola,

Em um esforço de aumentar produtividade e eficácia eu estou iniciando a realizar uma nova política pessoal de emails. Recentemente, notei que gasto mais tempo embaralhando minha caixa de entrada e menos tempo dedicado a tarefa sendo realizada. Isto se tornou uma distração desnecessária que definitivamente cria grandes engarrafamentos na minha lista de tarefas. Assim sendo, eu irei verificar e responder a novos emails apenas as 11 da manha e as 4 da tarde durante a semana. Tentarei responder a emails de forma programada sem negligenciar as necessidades de nossos clientes ou identidade de marca. Se você precisa de uma resposta com limite de tempo… Não hesite em me ligar. Normalmente chamadas são mais divertidas…. Tomara que esta abordagem a emails resultará em menos tempos de espera com mais trabalho focado e criativo de minha parte.

Parabéns & isto é para vida fora da caixa de emails.”

Até agora a resposta tem sido bem-recebida e com vários apoios. Aqui esta a resposta que um dos nossos diretores enviou com copia a todos:

“Pedro,

FANTASTICA abordagem de gestão do tempo!!! Adoraria ver mais ente adotar tal política.

-Carlos

” Estou batendo o pé e já esta dando resultados. Quanto mais prosseguimos mais pessoas aderem a política e eu não faço nenhuma propaganda (mesmo que os SXSW sigam – e eu trabalhe na radio com todo mundo a toda esta semana. No entanto, cada pessoa receia que não vá funcionar para elas se tentassem.(”oh, se eu tenho em tantas listas” ou “Tudo que faço e’ trabalhar na minha caixa de emails, tenho certeza que já ouviu isto).

Quanto a sua apresentação… Um grande ensinamento que peguei foi aplicar 80/20 ao meu fluxo de trabalho. Tenho certeza de que sempre gasto um tempão com coisas definitivamente não estão dando o devido retorno. Ouvindo sua apresentação sobre outra luz consegui começar a reinvestir o tempo antes desperdiçado com clientes e processos. Faço um monte de tarefas que os assistentes deveriam estar fazendo. Então comecei a designar responsabilidades apropriadamente. Liberando tempo a assuntos mais relevantes. Será um processo lento, mas a direção esta plenamente de acordo comigo.

Ate mais,

Pedro

Gerente de Marca

KROX & KBPA

Olha outra resposta automática outro participante implementou com sucesso:

Obrigado por seu email! Devido a minha carga de trabalho estarei verificando a caixa de emails apenas as 11 da manha e 4 da tarde. Se você precisar de algo com urgência chama-me no celular para que possa solucionar sua solicitação.

Obrigado, e fico a disposição.

Ricardo

Minha resposta automática de me limita a uma vez por dia e avisa “verifico emails apenas uma vez ao dia, em geral a noite. Se precisa uma resposta ainda hoje favor ligar no celular.”

No email profissional avisa que verifico meus emails apenas uma vez em cada 7-10 dias.

A parte mais difícil, de fato, é manter-se longe da bendita caixa de mensagens. Assumir uma dieta rígida de pouca-informacao (low-info) e focar nos produtos, ao invés de, nas matérias-primas, sua família e fins-de-semanas vão lhe agradecer por isto.