Email Agony

As a manager of a team of, say, 30 staff, you are included in numerous email communications. The communications can fall into the below categories:

1- Genuine email for your action that no one else can perform (maybe less than 10%)
2- Inquiries about the team scope and activities (around 20%)
3- Carbon copied in communication with team members (around 70%)

Reading some 200 emails per day and sorting it out for the possible 10% that requires your attention is certainly not what you are to spend your day on. The worse thing about checking emails constantly is that it is addictive and can take control of your life. If you have a blackberry, the situation can become easily dangerous for your health. While you are online with your email you can hardly concentrate on anything else and as a result cannot perform the core parts of the managerial activities like planning, and innovation.

A solution could be:

• Use email filters as smartly as possible to do the sorting out automatically.
• Limit the time during the day for checking emails to specific hours, and do not use your peak morning hours for emails.
• Trust your staff in that they will take care of the work independently, and spend your time rather on developing them to do so.
• Choose only the very necessary emails to respond to.

Some other ideas that could be tested are:

• Use auto reply for responding to frequent inquiries.
• Introduce focal points for activities and share their email addresses in your auto-reply
• Request inclusion of the word "escalation" in the email title, if the request is important enough that cannot wait for a day. Then you can have it sorted out in a specific folder to which you pay attention during other hours of the day outside your email hours.

Please, put a comment if you have successfully experienced other methods to deal with emails effectively and efficiently, or drop me an email for a more comprehensive thought.