Are e-mails like squirrels?

Everyone working in a busy workplace with multiple colleagues, managing a sales team or managing customers will relate to the constant pressure of inbound e-mails. And it’s not just e-mails nowadays, there are a plethora of platforms which we use with messaging facilities such as WhatsApp, every social media platform, LinkedIn, Slack…messages come from all angles at all hours of the day (literally for those of us working across multiple time zones).

What most people don’t have when it comes to managing inbound correspondence is some kind of system.

If you find yourself basically working in your e-mail inbox all day, don’t panic, you’re absolutely not alone however, you also probably find yourself routinely getting to the end of the day feeling as if you’ve worked flat out yet your to-do list is longer than it was at the beginning of the day and you haven’t ticked a single item off…….but I bet you’ve sent/dealt with in excess of 100 e-mails! And therein lies the challenge, without a comprehensive system, e-mails will simply take-over your entire work day.

Ask yourself this:

• How many e-mails do you receive each day which are genuinely urgent? (The definition of “urgent” being requiring immediate action or attention)
• How many disasters would occur if you waited a few hours to respond to most e-mails? This is probably regularly the scenario anyway as a result of attending meetings and being away from your desk/inbox so you are most likely already doing this at times.
• When you don’t reply immediately to a truly urgent e-mail, perhaps because you are in a meeting or off-site, how many times is the scenario allowed to reach a critical stage as a result? Probably not often as what will typically happen? You got it, someone else involved will call you or come and find you.

My point here being that the time saved by not working in your inbox all day is massively outweighed by any potential negatives by responding to things a little slower than normal.

“But my clients/customers/staff/suppliers are different, they expect me to respond immediately when they e-mail me” – yes I’m sure they do, that’s because you work in your inbox and having been replying immediately to them for the last 5 years (at the same time as still have uncompleted items on your to-do list from 5 years ago too!).

When your e-mail client sits open on your desktop, it is human nature to be curious when the ping/pop-up appears to say “you have mail”. I guess it could be that major unsolicited order you’ve been praying for to hit your quota, or an unexpected price decrease from a supplier, it could be many things but the reality is that what it is can most likely wait until you finish the task you were working on before you were distracted.

If you’ve seen the Pixar animation Up, you’ll be familiar with Dug the dog and his ability to be distracted by squirrels, if you’re not familiar with then then please have a look on YouTube (I've included a link at the end of the article), it’s funny but also extremely relevant. E-mail to you is what a squirrel is to Dug. Don’t be like Dug.

With that in mind I recommend the following starting actions:

• Try not having your e-mail client open at all times – only open it at set scheduled times in the day, I prefer mid-morning (deliberately keeping early morning free from e-mails as that’s when I am at my most creative and productive – I don’t want to waste that time chasing squirrels), early-afternoon (after lunch), late afternoon (when I’m normally frazzled) and potentially an evening check if I’m working late. With this schedule, the longest anything will sit unanswered is from the evening until mid-the following morning.
• If that’s a step too far for you to begin with, try just disabling the notifications from your e-mail client so at least you won’t be distracted every time you get a notification through from Facebook. You’ll have the comfort of being able to peek at your inbox whenever you need a hit and everything will still be there.
• Like me, if you do find yourself sometimes having to work in, for example, Outlook to draft outbound e-mails, manage your calendar, manage tasks (try getting an external task management system, that’s for another day though), you can easily disable the automatic mail download/check meaning that you have to manually click on “receive” before mail will come in. This allows you to use the other features of your software without the unscheduled distractions of e-mails automatically coming in.

Control your e-mail, don’t let e-mail control you. Leave the squirrels, most of them will still be there in a few hours.

Alan Graham - [email protected]

Satcho is a Global Business Development consultancy firm. Objective based principles allow us to ensure we establish and align activity with strategic and operational goals of our clients. We specialise in sales, marketing and operations with multi-market experience in several sectors; automotive, retail, insurance, healthcare and SAAS. Sustainability is forefront in our mind with everything we do.

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