Communicating with someone used to be easy. You could simply pick up the phone and give them a call, or sit down and write a note. Fast forward a few years and you now 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 with others has taken place in a relatively short period of time. Many agents now tell me that e-mail is their primary means of communicating with most clients.
Yet this new communication option has introduced problems into the 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 with them, but only up to a point.
The problem, as I see it, is that we are allowing e-mail to manage us instead of learning to proactively manage the e-mail that we deal with every day. Like 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 Outlook inbox and reading an e-mail but, because we don’t know what to do with it, we leave it in our inbox.
Because paper and fax have been around as communication options for some time we have learned how to manage them well. We can take some of those same principles and apply them to e-mail. Here are some ideas you can use to help everyone start learning to manage e-mail like any other communication.
1) Turn off all notifications for when you receive a new e-mail. There are very few e-mails that are received by staff in an agency that have to be answered immediately. 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 your concentration is broken and it will take a few minutes for you to figure out where you were and get started again.
2) Train yourself to review e-mails on a consistent basis. If you’re not being notified when new e-mails arrive, you need to 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.
3) David Allen, author of the book ”Getting Things Done” (highly recommended), suggests that when you are 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 have 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 better manage e-mail communications, both for yourself and your staff. You’ll be less frustrated and your clients will experience better service.
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