Tag Archives: marsha egan

How to Have Smarter E-Mail Management

by on January 17, 2012 in Grow Your Business

E-mail is here to stay.  And the amount of the e-mail we all receive is steadily increasing.  With the average professional receiving between 80 and 100 e-mails every day, it can be a real challenge to not only manage all those e-mails, but to stay current.  It is an even bigger challenge to be able to do these things in what we used to define as the normal work day.

Unfortunately, many people have gotten into the habit of “saving” their e-mail for their quiet time — before work, during lunch, after the office closes, or weekends.  While this practice may be appropriate in exceptional circumstances, too many people have incorporated these personal times into their regular workdays. Now people are finding that they are spending more and more time each day working as e-mail is extending their workload by as much as two hours.

 If you find yourself suffering from e-mail overload and staying at the office later than intended, here are some time-saving tips.

Reduce the number of times you check for new e-mail.  Constantly checking for new e-mails and responding to them immediately actually results in decreased productivity. Therefore, we recommend checking no more than five times daily.  Morning, midmorning, after lunch, mid afternoon, and before the end of the workday.  Tell people that if they need you urgently, to please call.

Incorporate e-mail sorting into your day. You cannot avoid e-mail but by sorting, prioritizing, and planning specific times in your day (not after work or on the weekends) to conquer the e-mailed tasks, you will set the stage for getting out of the office earlier.

Differentiate between “sorting” and “handling” e-mail.  Too many people confuse these two actions.  It is important that you go into your e-mail a few times daily and sort the newly received items.  Note: sort does not mean work.

The two-minute limit: One exception to the sort versus work rule is if you can accomplish the task in the e-mail within two minutes, do it! If not, file it in an appropriate folder to be viewed when you are planning your priorities for the day.

Set a regular time, once daily, to plan your work for the day.  This allotted time is when you go into your sorted e-mail to determine its priority in relation to other projects, telephone calls, meetings, and assigned work.  Most people do this in the morning. By setting a regular time daily you will be assured of working the e-mails you receive in the proper priority.

Control your e-mail, don’t let it control you: Turn off automatic send and receive and check your e-mail on your own time. Don’t let the e-mail “ding” pull you away from the work you are already doing.

By taking ownership of your e-mail, reducing the number of times you check your e-mail daily, separating the sort and work functions of your e-mail, and incorporating the work delivered by e-mail into the planning of your workday, you will be able to reclaim that extra time, and get out of the office earlier — every day!

Do you have a trick or rule that you use to control your email? 

Marsha Egan, CPCU, PCC, is CEO of the Egan Group, Inc. An ICF Certified Professional Coach, she is a leading authority on email productivity. She works with companies who want to recover lost time and money due to wasteful email practices. Assess your emailing habits and find great tips on how to manage your email at http://InboxDetox.com.

 

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Email Productivity Tips: How to Manage Your Inbox

Email Productivity Tips: How to Manage Your Inbox

by on February 3, 2011 in Q & A Interview, SmallBizChat

small biz chat with melinda emersonEach week as Smallbizlady, I conduct interviews with small business experts on my weekly Twitter talk show #SmallBizChat. This is excerpted from my #SmallBizChat interview with Marsha Egan (CPCU, PCC)  @marshaegan.  Marsha is CEO of The Egan Group, Inc., a Reading, Pennsylvania based workplace productivity coaching firm. She is author of Inbox Detox and the Habit of E-mail Excellence. She can be reached at marsha@marshaegan.com or http://InboxDetox.com. 

Small Biz Lady:  Why should we be concerned with e-mail and inbox productivity?

A. In today’s world, we must do more with less. A huge productivity advantage is staring us in the face, because unknowingly most workers lose precious minutes and seconds every day because they are inefficient with their e-mail, and the way they handle it saps productivity. It is estimated by Basex that $900 million annually is lost because of e-mail handling inefficiencies. Instead of having to hire new employees, if we can be more efficient in our e-mail handling, the average business can reclaim an hour or more per person per day. For a 20 person office, that is 100 hours of productivity each week!

Small Biz Lady: How can we reclaim an hour of productivity per person per day?

A. There isn’t just one solution, because each person handles their e-mail and inbox is differently. One of the biggest culprits however is what we call the cost of interruption recovery. It is estimated that the average person takes an average of four minutes to recover from any interruption, and this doesn’t include handling the interruption itself. It just means the amount of time to get refocused, back in the zone, and back on track. If we allow 15 e-mail interruptions to disturb our train of thought each day, we essentially spend 60 minutes, or an hour recovering from those interruptions. So one of the quick hits in becoming more efficient in your e-mail handling is to minimize your interruptions.

Small Biz Lady: How can we minimize our interruptions?

A. The easiest way is to turn off all the flashes and dings that announce a newly received e-mail message. Most people can’t resist looking up when that occurs. We need to take control, turn off the flashes and sounds, and minimize or turn off e-mail to enable uninterrupted periods of time to get essential work done. This is easy to do, hit people are very hesitant to do it.

 Small Biz Lady: Explain the two minute rule.

A. This is one of the secrets to our 12 steps that gets all of this humming.  It is a takeoff on David Allan’s Getting Things Done.  This rule states that if you believe that the item can be handled in two minutes or less, handle it, regardless of priority.  While this may appear to fly in the face of all time management theory, the need to reduce the e-mail clutter trumps that.  So if it will take you three minutes, drag and drop it somewhere. If it will take you to minutes or less, handle it, and get it out of the in box.

Small Biz Lady: Why are people hesitant to shut their inboxes down?

A. Many people have a fear that they will miss something important, or that they are not being customer focused. We are not advocating not reading e-mail, we are advocating managing it in chunks of time, and allowing other chunks of time to accomplish work that goes to the bottom line of the company. It is rare that e-mailers expect an immediate response, yet some people feel that they need to provide immediate responses. The reality is that most people sending e-mail messages don’t even wonder whether it has been received for 24 to 48 hours. In the majority of businesses, a response within two hours to an e-mail message is very acceptable. We have all been in meetings that have gone that long, and the sky did not fall in while we were inaccessible by e-mail. The cost of having the ability to respond immediately is that you cannot turn your dings and flashes off, which means that you have to tolerate interruptions all day long — and this is where you lose a huge amount of productivity.

 Small Biz Lady: What other e-mailing practices sap productivity?

A. Many people use their inboxes as a makeshift “to do” list. They waste a huge amount of time scrolling up and down, looking for messages, trying to find work to do, wasting time trying to eliminate some of the smaller items, and getting stressed out because of all the work they see the minute they open their inboxes yet they aren’t going to get done that day. Scrolling up and down wastes valuable time.

 Opening, reading closing, rereading, is also wasteful. Leaving 250 items in your inbox is just like having 250 pieces of paper on your desk, in no files, strewn over your desk with no organization, reminding you of work but without priority.

Small Biz Lady: Do you recommend that we empty our inboxes regularly?

A. Yes. Actually, we recommend that the inbox is emptied every time it is viewed. Now, don’t get the shakes here! We are not saying that each item must be worked and handled. We are saying that it should be sorted to a place that is out of the inbox, and triaged so that when it is time to work on that item, it is easily findable, and a reminder comes up that enables you to set the right priorities. This is one of the important steps in our 12 step program to curing your e-mail E–diction, featured in our book Inbox Detox, available on Amazon.

The key is to think of moving items out of your inbox as a sorting function, not a working function. There is a huge distinction. Just like you sort the mail out of your P.O. Box into piles to be handled later, triaging our work that is delivered by e-mail messages is the same. We also recommend that you spread out your viewing of your inbox to the longest intervals possible, based on your work. We recommend for the average business checking five times a day — first thing in the morning, midmorning, after lunch, midafternoon, and just before the end of the day.

Small Biz Lady: Where should we put the items that require our attention, if we can’t leave them in the inbox?

A. We recommend creating two folders — Action A., and action B. Place the important work in the Action a folder, and the not so important work in the Action B. folder. Simple as that. It essentially moves all that stuff that you are holding in your inbox into a triage folder where you go get it, rather than having it stare you in the face every morning when you open up your inbox. The important action that accompanies the moving of these items into your Action folders is to set a reminder for when you need to view that item to work at. As an example, if your boss asks for a report to be due three weeks from now, don’t leave it in your inbox to remind you, move it to your Action A folder, and set a reminder for five days before it is due. You will know it exactly where to go to find that message.

Small Biz Lady: If you put items into folders, isn’t there a chance that you might forget them?

A. No. Here’s why. When you get into the habit of setting reminders relating to the triaged messages, and when you incorporate viewing those reminders when you organize your daily work, you won’t be able to forget them. Have the reminders set to be delivered at the same time that you organize your day, so that all of the tasks that you triggered for that day will come up when you are doing your daily work plan.

It’s important for people to understand that doing e-mail is not a separate task, e-mail just delivers tasks. So when you are managing your day, you need to look at the meetings, the telephone calls, the reports you need to write, and the tasks whose reminders have come up by e-mail — all at the same time, and make decisions about the priorities with which you will work them.

Small Biz Lady: What other practices can we use to enhance our e-mail productivity?

A. One of the most important ones is to make a determination as to what is the best way to communicate, before defaulting to e-mail. Too many people try to use e-mail when it shouldn’t be used.

So the first question to ask is what is the best way to communicate? We challenge people to consider the overall time of the transaction, not just the time it takes you to get it off your desk. In other words if you are going to send an e-mail to 10 people and they will all respond to you, think not only about the time it takes you to send e-mail and read the responses but the time it will take all of them collectively.

Sometimes picking up the phone or even leaving voicemail messages is more effective. One of our sayings is, “when dialogue is needed, e-mail is not.” It is important to remember that e-mail is a one-way communication, and all voice inflection and body language is lost, thereby opening it up for misinterpretation and emotional responses which could actually add to the overall time of the transaction.

Small Biz Lady: What can we do to receive less e-mail?

A. Some people think that they have no control over how much e-mail they receive, but they do. We believe that e-mail begets e-mail. The more e-mail you send, the more e-mail you will get. The more people you copy on an e-mail message, the more e-mail messages you will get. So, if you want to receive less e-mail, pick up the phone more often. Copy only those who really need the message. Avoid sending one word responses, like “OK” or “Thank You.”

Small Biz Lady: What tips do you have about writing the effective e-mail messages?

A. Write very short e-mail messages. With 70% of e-mail readers skimming messages, the less you write, the more they will read. Put the Main point in the very first sentence of the message. And break up your messages into no more than three sentence paragraphs, preferably two. You need to make it very easy for people to read your messages. Have an auto signature that allows people to easily respond, and include your e-mail address. Use excellent grammar and punctuation, every time — remember, you are your message. Never send an emotional e-mail message — remember e-mail is for facts, not feelings.

For more tips on starting or growing your small business subscribe to Melinda Emerson’s blog at www.succeedasyourownboss.com

Melinda F. Emerson, known to many as SmallBizLady is one of America’s leading small business experts. As a seasoned entrepreneur, professional speaker, and small business coach, she develops audio, video and written content to fulfill her mission to end small business failure. As CEO of MFE Consulting LLC, Melinda educates entrepreneurs and Fortune 500 companies on subjects including small business start-up, business development and social media marketing. She has been featured on NBC Nightly News, the Tavis Smiley Radio Show, in the Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur and Black Enterprise Magazine. She hosts #SmallBizChat weekly on Twitter for emerging entrepreneurs and publishes a resource blog www.succeedasyourownboss.com Melinda is also the author of the national bestseller Become Your Own Boss in 12 months; A Month-by-Month Guide to a Business That Works. (Adams Media 2010)

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How to Tame Your Email

by on January 28, 2010 in Social Media

Every week as @SmallBizLady, I conduct interviews with experts on my Twitter talk show #SmallBizChat.  The show takes place every Wed on Twitter from 8-9pm ET.  This is excerpted from my recent interview with @MarshaEgan who is a Certified Life and Executive Coach with the International Coach Federation and the author of the book, the Inbox Detox. As one of Pennsylvania’s Best 50 Women in Business, her passion is helping others achieve their career, professional, and personal goals. She is a professional speaker on business success topics such as improving productivity through better organization and running more successful meetings through time management. You can find more about her here: Http://MarshaEgan.com

Smallbizlady: What made you interested in email productivity and email addiction?

Marsha Egan: One of my areas of specialty has been time management and life planning. At one point, five of my coaching clients were all struggling with their inabilities to get out from under their e-mail. To help them conquer that issue, and to add value as a coach, I created a one-hour teleseminar on the subject of the e-mail productivity, and got an overwhelming response. That’s when I first started to realize the pain around all of this. To date, we have conducted 40 of these teleseminars.

Smallbizlady: When did you realize that a 12-step program was necessary and was it a conscious choice to have the same number of steps as similar addiction programs?

Marsha Egan: I developed a formula approach to helping people become more productive with their e-mail, and broke it into a number of steps that build upon each other. We consciously, but very loosely used the 12-step analogy, and called it an e-ddiction, almost as a play on words on both 12-step approaches and addictions. The e-ddiction program began as a tongue and cheek idea — a memorable way for people to become more productive–easy steps akin to a very recognizable program that people could refer to and remember to keep their email use in check.

Smallbizlady: What is the cost of email misuse?

Marsha Egan: It is absolutely mind blowing. Basex, a research firm, has estimated the loss of productivity throughout the world at over $900 billion.  The average worker spends 28% of his or her day with interruptions or recovering from interruptions. By managing your email, the average person can reclaim at least an hour of productivity a day. For a 20 person office, that is 100 hours of productivity a week. The biggest culprit is people allowing themselves to be continually interrupted by the ding of a newly received email. With the average recovery time for any interruption being 4 minutes, if you’re interrupted only 15 times in a day, you’ll spend 60 minutes recovering from the interruption. Most workers receive between 80 and 150 emails a day. You do the math.

Smallbizlady: What needs to be done about email from a business perspective?

Marsha Egan: First, businesses need to “get” the fact that managing e-mail productivity can be a competitive advantage.  Here’s a quick summary of major steps that can be taken…  The business unit needs to stop EVER sending urgent emails. If it is urgent, or needed in under 3 hours, call or visit. Don’t email. What this does is that it allows workers to shut down their inboxes and stop being interrupted. But if they have a boss who uses email urgently, they can’t turn it off, and must handle those continual costly interruptions. Second, check for email 5 times or less per day. Third, differentiate between handling email, and sorting it. If you go into your inbox with the intention of sorting, you’ll be able to manage it much better. And fourth, empty your inbox every time you go into it. It is not a holding tank or to do list, it delivers stuff you need to sort.

Smallbizlady: What can individuals do to better manage their email?

Marsha Egan: It is not just one thing. I realized quickly that there is a stepped approach to TAKING control of your email and inbox. That’s how we came up with the 12 Steps. It starts with on the person declaring that he or she wants to change their e-mail habits, and take ownership or a proactive approach to managing their e-mail. It is focused on helping people realize that they can take control, then gives them the actual steps to taking control. These steps include checking email when it fits YOUR schedule, not when you hear the “ding” on your computer, changing your view of the inbox from a holding tank to a mail delivery receptacle, then helping them file items to be worked in separate action folders that they can grab when they are planning their days. We’ve tried this approach with over 300 folks, and have heard great comments. The biggest challenge is for people to engrain the practices, and make them “good habits.” Our website is intended to be helpful to people wanting to improve their habits: http://EganEmailSolutions.com

Smallbizlady: So, once a person decides to take control of his or her e-mail, what is the next step?

Marsha Egan: The next step is to begin a new habit of checking e-mail in the longest intervals possible. We recommend no more than five times daily for the average business.  Tim Ferris, of the Four Hour Work week, recommends twice daily. What this does is it minimizes interruptions, and allows people to get other work done. This is a very big shift for people who, on average check their e-mail 70 plus times daily, or looking up any time a new e-mail is received. It also requires the person to turn off that dang ding and flash. We recommend first thing in the morning, midmorning, after lunch, midafternoon, and 15 to 20 minutes before you close out the workday.

Smallbizlady: Why is it important to get email under control?

Marsha Egan: The reason this is so important is because any type of interruption is very costly.  It takes the average person an average of four minutes to recover from any interruption.  We are not talking about handling the interruption, we are just talking about the time after the interruption occurs and is handled for you to get back in the work zone. In other words, if someone stops by your office to talk about your child’s birthday party, (and it takes only 30 seconds,) after the person leaves, it will take the average person an average of four minutes to get back to the letter he or she was writing, the report they were creating, or the web site they were designing. So if you do the math, if you are interrupted by only 15 e-mail messages pinging and flashing at you in a day, you’re interruption recovery time is 60 minutes, or an hour.  With people receiving an average of 80-150 e-mail messages daily, e-mail has become one of the worst interrupters of our lifetimes, and saps up to 10 hours of productivity per person per week.

Smallbizlady: Once we choose to check the e-mail only a few times daily, how do we handle all those e-mails?

Marsha Egan: You have to shift the way you view your inbox away from it being a disorganized to do list and holding tank for all the messages you have to viewing it more like a U. S. Postal Service mailbox that delivers mail.  I don’t know if many people who put mail back in the U. S. Postal Service mailbox, do you? Using this new approach, then, shift to a new habit of emptying the inbox every time you view it.  This is why viewing it only a few times a day is important.  By going into the each e-mail message briefly and determining its priority level — sort 10 rather than working — you will be able to triage your work rather than be distracted by it.  And, when you do this you start at the top and one by one go down the list, or start at the bottom and go one by one of the list, rather than hunting and choosing.  Don’t move the next message until it is out of your inbox.  It takes a big habit change for a lot of people.

Smallbizlady: Where do we move all these messages?

Marsha Egan: First, the delete button is your friend.  Delete.  Delete.  Delete.  Second, make a choice as to whether the e-mail is a task that you need to take action on, or a message you need to save, but requires no action. If it requires action, you will drag and drop it into an Action Folder.  You need only a few action folders, I suggest Action — a, action — b.  Action — a is for higher priority items, and action — b is for lower priority items.  This is the area where you hold anything requiring action, and it is an easy place to find things when you need them.  But we are not done — for anything of importance and or with a deadline, then set a reminder.  Use what ever reminder system works for you, whether it is a day planner, an electronic feature of your Outlook, or whatever works for you.

If it is an item you need to save for reference, you will drag and drop these in to a reference folder that you create.

Smallbizlady:  What is the two minute rule?

This is one of the secrets to our 12 steps that gets all of this humming.  It is a takeoff on David Allan’s Getting Things Done.  There is an exception to all the dragging and dropping involved in sorting all of your incoming e-mail — and that is to use the two minute rule.  This rule states that if you believe that the item can be handled in two minutes or less, handle it, regardless of priority.  While this may appear to fly in the face of all time management theory, the need to reduce the e-mail clutter trumps that.  So if it will take you three minutes, drag and drop it somewhere. If it will take you to minutes or less, handle it, and get it out of the in box.

Smallbizlady: But what if I forget to check on all that stuff that I have put in folders?

Marsha Egan: You won’t forget.  Because you will start a new daily habit of planning your entire day at a specific, regular time — most people use the mornings. This is when you plan your entire day, not just do e-mail.  You assemble everything you need to consider for the day, return phone calls, meetings, projects, and tasks delivered by e-mail, and this is when you set your priority list for the day.  This helps you avoid e-mail messages arriving sporadically drawing you off your plan.  Of course you may have some urgent items that appear, and require handling — that is business — but viewing your reminders that have popped up in the morning based on what you have dragged and dropped into folders, will enable you to go into the folder access the item and handle in its correct priority.

Smallbizlady: What is your best advice for all of our chatters to manage your e-mail better?

Marsha Egan: The most important thing to recognize is the way we e-mail has become habit, and habits are very difficult to change.  Trying these new procedures needs to be focused on for at least a month.  If it feels uncomfortable, power through it.  If you’re having trouble changing to checking your e-mail only five times a day, start by checking it only a times a day and whittle it down.  Changing habits takes focused attention, but over time it becomes the new habit.  That is why my book is called Inbox Detox and the Habit of E-mail Excellence. It is the only book on the market that deals with e-mailing productivity has a habit that can be changed, rather then just processes to do differently.

Disclosure Note: I was mailed three books to review, to prepare for this interview and give away on #smallbizchat.

If you found this interview helpful, join us on Wednesdays 8-9pm ET follow @SmallBizChat on Twitter.

How to participate in #SmallBizChat: http://bit.ly/S797e

Melinda Emerson, “SmallBizLady,” is a Veteran Entrepreneur, Small Business Coach and Social Media Strategist who hosts Smallbizchat weekly for emerging entrepreneurs on Twitter.  Her first book is, Become Your Own Boss in 12 Months, is out in March 2010.

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