How many hours a day do you sit in front of a computer, responding to email?
In my father’s day, it was called correspondence. He would receive letters, reports in large brown envelopes and he would dictate his response to a secretary. The secretary would type the response and leave it in his INBOX for signature. This was correspondence.
And I am certain that my father blocked off a portion each day for correspondence.
That word, correspondence, has been lost, but the activity, albeit electronic, is likely to consume more of your day than in my father’s day.
So, how many hours a day, do you sit in front of a computer, responding to email? And in those hours, what strategies do you use to be more efficient? What strategies do you use to be more effective?
I turn my email OFF for portions of the day. Otherwise, I find myself a slave– lured in by “what’s new” instead of “what’s important.” I alos mark calendar times to deal with email.
I leave my “new e-mail received” alert turned off 100% of the time. I like to check e-mail once every hour or so – that reduces interruptions and increases productivity.
I’m also working on writing the shortest e-mail possible that still covers the subject. Tom is great being concise in his blog postings!
I do most of my correspondence at home in the evening (for 1 hour) so that the start of my work day contains only action items.
During the day, I check my e-mails once per hour and then carry out the following steps immediately:
1. General Info = skim & delete.
2. FYI = skim & archive.
3. Questions = flag for followup tonight.
4. Urgent emails = take immediate action and archive.
But now, we also have Office Communicator which can serve as a larger interrupter.
I have this Problem and it takes about (10-15) % of my time but no effective solution yet to reduce these time.