Email etiquette











Multiple studies of our email addiction agree – we’re spending far too much time just managing our inboxes, and not enough getting on with our “real work”.
For some of us that’s hundreds of incoming messages a day, and as much as 2 or 3 hours every working day spent just dealing with them.

All this is a massive drain on our attention, focus and energy, and a major barrier to being productive.
As well handling our own bulging inboxes, how we each write the emails we send out is a major factor in the effectiveness of team communication and productivity.
Making sure we attend to a few basic points of email etiquette is a good place to start.

For Think Productive’s favourite email etiquette tips, click Here for a PDF of our recent article in NAHPA magazine.

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If you’re looking for GTD training, our ‘How to Get Things Done’ workshops offer the basics on how to implement the ideas from David Allen’s GTD book, along with the best theory, tips and tricks from the likes of Peter Drucker, Tim Ferriss and many more! It’s available in-house to your company or also through our public workshops across the UK.

Time Management Training has changed! Click here to find out about our productivity-focussed Time management workshops, email training and facilitation training.

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The do’s and don’ts of Email Etiquette

Did you know that some 294 billion emails are sent each day?! (See here for this and lots of other email-related trivia.)

We love our email - do you?!

Despite its ubiquity, email is still misused on a daily basis, with poorly constructed subject headers, unclear content and careless CCing and BCCing taking place left, right and centre.

Part of our mission is to revolutionize the way email is used so that it becomes excellently efficient rather than enormously erroneous.

If you want to be one of the pioneers of the email revolution, download a copy of our Email Etiquette Do’s and Don’ts, stick it on your wall and begin to change the way you use email – for good!

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Make friends with your email again – AND get some actual work done

Author: Lee Cottier, Productivity Ninja
LinkedIn: LeeCottier
Twitter: @LeeCottier

Multiple studies of our email addiction agree – we’re spending far too much time just managing our inboxes, and not enough getting on with our “real work”.

For some of us that’s hundreds of incoming messages a day, and as much as 40% of our working hours spent just dealing with them (source). Just this month, a revealing LinkedIn survey (LinkedIn login required) showed that over half of us are ‘checking our emails’ in excess of 20 times every day.

All this is a massive drain on our attention, focus and energy, and a major barrier to being productive – and a big part of the reason why our niche Email Etiquette and Getting Your Inbox to Zero workshops are so popular.

Here are some practical steps you can take to develop a healthier relationship with your email, and ensure you can win back enough attention and energy to actually get some work done!

1. Turn off notifications. Remove all visual and audio ‘you have new mail’ notifications. You did know that’s possible (and allowed) didn’t you?

2. Turn off email. Even better turn off your mail client completely most of the time. Yes I really did say that. For those of you who are worried the world might end if you did that, I promise you it’s quite safe.

3. Schedule time for email. Only engage with your email when you choose to, rather than automatically complying the instant it nags you to. We recommend defined times in short bursts, for example 5-10 minutes at the top of every hour, or longer 20 minute sessions 3 or 4 times per day.

4. Stop constantly checking. Instead ‘process’ your mail (more on what that is below), then get back to doing your actual work. As Merlin Mann (who coined the term ‘Inbox Zero’) says “stop taking orders and make the sandwiches”!

5. Use the tools. Learn how to use the features of your mail client to triage your mail for you. Filtering the lower importance and lower value email (which you can then review once per day), will help you to give your proper and prompt attention to those messages that really matter.

6. It’s an inbox not a data vault. Your inbox ‘should only be for things that you haven’t read yet’ (again that’s from Merlin Mann) – when you ‘process’ this mail your aim is to convert incoming mail into to-do list action items, calendar appointments, download and file attachments, etc.

7. Move it out. As soon as they’re processed mail items should immediately be moved out of your inbox: either deleted or archived, or if it does require action that can’t be completed there and then (in less than 2 minutes) to a ‘needs action’ or ‘needs reply’ folder etc.

8. Lose the pile. That last one’s really important so I’m going to say it again. Don’t just leave that opened mail sitting there in your inbox (or even worse flag it or mark it as unread again ‘so I know to come back to that one later’). After all, no-one keeps all the opened letters they’ve ever received and their envelopes in one massive ever growing pile on their doormat!

9. It’s not a to-do list. Stop using your email inbox as your to-do list (it’s horrifying how many people do this!). There are far more appropriate tools for this job, and it will reduce the temptation to keep your mail client open all the time, increasing its power to distract.

10. Feel the relief. Working this way will help you achieve ‘Inbox Zero’, which feels great, and is hugely important part of a robust personal productivity approach.

And remember, email addiction is just one (bad) work habit that might be reducing your productivity and effectiveness. For other way we can help you or your team deliver their very best work, check out our full range of in-house and public workshops, or contact us for a consultation with one of our team of Productivity Ninjas.

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10 top email tips from Think Productive

graham allcott

1. Keep your inbox at zero. Be clear on what’s coming in, which emails are putting pressure on your time and attention and what you need to keep on top of. By aiming to keep your inbox at zero, this will help you make up-front decisions about what each email means, which are valuable to you and which you need to be ruthless with.

2. Perfect the art of the subject line. Writing clear subject lines is the most sure-fire way to reduce the volume of emails come back at you, as well as to ensure that the emails that you send to others are clearly understood and quickly dealt-with by their recipients

3. Keep it short! The website www.five.sentenc.es suggests never using more than five sentences in an email – if you’ve got more to say, pick up the phone, or put it in a word document. That way, your 5 sentences in the email can be devoted to describing the action required and is likely to be more clearly understood. Add ‘www.five.sentenc.es’ to your email signature to ensure that your colleagues hold you to the five sentence rule!

4. Make decisions. Never close an email back down without having decided what action, if any, you need to take as a result. That way, you’ll never waste time reading an email more than once. Reduce procrastination time by increasing your decisiveness.

5. Turn Outlook off! Don’t be a slave to your Microsoft Outlook account. Turning it off, even for just an hour a day will increase the focus and energy you have available for other (non-email) tasks

6. Don’t mistake connectivity for productivity. Blackberry and iphone users often fall into this trap. It’s easy to mistake being connected with things getting done and just as easy to feel pressured or tempted to be replying to emails late into the evening. Actually, we need our rest time, so spend time NOT checking your Blackberry, relax and you’ll be surprised how much easier some of those decisions are the next morning after a good nights’ sleep!

7. CC less. CC is an over-used button and the cause of much of the excess volume that we see in so many offices. Think before you send an email about who REALLY needs to be CC’d in – remember every email interruption costs a colleagues’ time, so decide who you need to bug versus who you can spare. You’ll find if you do this regularly, others will start to develop more respect for your own time, too!

8. Keep your reference folders simple – having sub-folders and sub-sub-folders only makes it difficult for you to quickly file emails away. Have a simple folder structure with no more than a dozen, broadly-defined folders. This will save you heaps of time filing away and the chances are it won’t affect your ability to retrieve emails at all.

9. Know your audience. Resist the temptation to send comedy forwards to professional contacts you want to respect you, but equally recognize when a little informality will help build a stronger working relationship.

10. Think about it! Surveys have shown that the average employee spends about 41% of their time on email, so even getting slightly better at it can be a huge productivity saving. Facilitate discussions about email policies within your organisation and invest in some good training!

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Spam in the Bin, Bacon in the Fridge

We all know what to do with email Spam – our anti-spam filters catch it and put it in the Bin where it belongs. If they’re working well we don’t even see it, never mind read it.

But there’s that big pile of other low-priority mail that’s still waiting for us every time we open our inboxes.
You know the sort of things we mean – Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter notifications, group newsletters, bulletins, service updates etc.

There’s a name for this stuff too – “Bacon”.

It’s mail you have asked to be sent, but really it’s only a few steps up from Spam.
It’s swamping the really crucial and time critical mail we want to be able to spot easily, and give our proper attention to.

So, what’s the solution?
Well, where would you keep your Bacon at home – in the Fridge of course!
Somewhere it will be safe and tucked away so you can grab it when you want to, and then close the door on it again quickly.

OK, that might be stretching the metaphor a bit too far, but here’s how we think Bacon email should be handled:

• Use filters and rules to automatically identify as much of it as possible the moment it arrives.
• Get your email client (or web interface) to divert it away from your main inbox (which we’re keeping just for the good stuff), either to a labeled category (if you use Gmail) or a separate folder (e.g. if you’re an Outlook user).
• ONLY go and look in there at planned times – e.g. daily, twice weekly, weekly etc. whatever suits you best. You should be processing the Bacon when YOU choose, not as a reflex when it happens to come in (we advise turning off those new mail alerts too).

• (Advanced Ninja tip) Tweak your filters further so that the Bacon gets sorted into different ‘flavours’, so can choose which one you want and when. For instance my Gmail setup separates out Twitter and LinkedIn stuff and all the newsletters I’ve subscribed to into different catch areas, well away from my main inbox.

Even a handful of well chosen filters and rules will dramatically reduce the amount of low-priority mail you see in your main inbox.
It doesn’t take long either – if you add only one filter or rule a day (takes seconds when you’ve bothered to learn how for your email client), by the end of the week you’ll see a huge reduction in inbox “noise”.

It’ll also mean you can deal with the remaining important messages better too – and then get out of your email altogether, and back to doing some real work!

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Getting your Inbox to Zero and How to Get Things Done

Think Productive are teaming up with Acevo to bring time management training to Acevo staff in the North West!!!

There are only a small number of places so book now to avoid disapointment. To book click here

This event is not through Think Productive, to book you have to go through Acevo!

Overview

Location: Leeds
Date: 22 October 2010
Time: 10:00 – 17:00
Price: Standard Price £105
ACEVO Member Price £80 (Saving £25)

This course is about learning how to effectively deal with the sheer volume of commitments and potential commitments that enter your life. You will learn a foolproof system for organising and defining your work. Overload stress will be replaced with purposeful and productive momentum.

Topics Covered

* Overcoming information overload
* The 5 phases of workflow
* Productive theories that really work
* Distinguishing connectivity from productivity
* Tips and tools for processing emails productively
* Tips and tools for reducing interruptions

Learning Outcomes

* Actually getting your inbox to zero or very cloes to it
* Creation of structures to keep your inbox clear
* Creation of a framework to manage and prioritise actions, informations and commitments
* A system to de-clutter your desk

Who Should Attend?

CEOs, Trustees and Top Level Managers from third sector organisations.

Employees of corporate sector and public sector companies with an interest in the third sector.

Further Queries?

Contact the events team E: events@acevo.org.uk or T: 020 7280 4962.

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Design

We love good design! Think Productive’s own brand identity has been given a complete make-over this year and the man responsible has been Allan Burrell of Burrell Design.

Our ‘design problem’ was quite a complex one: what we do (and what we find really works!) is to go way beyond the old-fashioned time management training that most people are used to. But at the same time, people still label their needs as time management training. We needed to show people that we’re different and that what we do really works. We wanted people to see that we are not some corporate training organisation that’s too huge to care about what they offer and we’re also not the kind of flighty freelance trainers that you meet at networking events. We don’t do crappy software training, we do email training that’s about getting your inbox to zero!

We’re different, we’re professional, we’re a little bit niche, we walk our talk and we love our work. Allan brought these ideas to life brilliantly in the brand identity and we’re really pleased that it helps us get the right message across.

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Time Management – do it standing up

meeting training, meeting workshop, time managment training, time management workshops

When you next have an office meeting – do it standing up. People with disabilities and minute takers can, of course, be seated if necessary.

Standing for meetings helps concentrate the mind and makes sure that people don’t talk for too long (with too many papers). If a meeting becomes longer than it is comfortable to stand, take a 15 minute break (to sit down) or reconvene the meeting at a later date.

Easyjet have their meetings standing up, and it doesn’t seem to have done them any harm.

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The new normal

Welcome to the New Normal! It might be less fun than the old economic stability we’ve all grown so used to, but there’ll be opportunities too.

Graham was attending an event hosted by: LondonHR. The guest speaker was Jackie Orme, Chief Executive of the CIPD

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10 ways to know you’ve cracked GTD

time management training, time management training uk, email training, email training uk, email etiquette, email management courses, email workshops, email training workshops uk, email training

At Think Productive, we love David Allen’s Getting Things Done – it’s one of the major time management systems we use both internally as a team and with our clients as part of our workshops. Here are 10 ways you know you’ve cracked it. Feel free to add your own as a comment too!

1. You think about clearing your email in the same way as you think about checking your voicemail
2. Wherever you go, you’ve always got a way to write things down
3. You know there’s a really important conversation you need to have with your partner so you put it on your agendas list
4. You read stuff you actually want to read when you’re on public transport or the dentists waiting room, rather than the free newspapers provided
5. When you think about where to go on holiday, your next thought is ‘what’s the next action?’
6. You have a favourite time or place to do your weekly review
7. You become the annoying person in a meeting who actually wants to know what the meeting is for in the first place
8. You feel relaxed and in control, despite having more projects on the go than anyone else you know
9. When you’re in the middle of a city centre with an hour or so to kill, you’ve got a list of shopping or culture possibilities to make sure the time is used productively
10. You don’t get overwhelmed about work at the beginning or end of the working week because you know your GTD system includes a thorough weekly review

If you want to find out more about GTD, buy the book here Or ask us about our workshop, How to Get Things Done.

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