Do You Let E-mail Disrupt Your Workflow?
WebWorkerDaily has this to say in a post about effectively handling incoming e-mails:
Email is our main mode of communication now, it seems that most people have a tendency to stop what they were focusing on as soon as an email comes in and respond to it accordingly, all the while the sender sits impatiently waiting for a response. Remember the time when we used to send letters in the post, or wait for responses on our voice mail? Are we getting way out of control with our email expectations?
I’d say yes, since so many people just drop everything when it pings in the inbox. I’ve tackled the e-mail issue (and I do get lots of e-mail) by doing a round every morning, and after lunch. I’m following it up during the day as well, but luckily I’ve been able to shake that nasty habit of dropping everything just because of an e-mail, and that has certainly boosted my productivity. Another thing I’ve done is turned off any instant messengers that I don’t actually need for work at the moment, that’s a time and distraction saver.
How we handle our e-mail flow is a personal thing though. I tag them, and try to keep a pretty empty inbox, but that only works when I’m not crowded with work. The sad thing is that there almost always are a couple of e-mails that will be delayed, sometimes up to a week, since they take more time to process or just isn’t urgent. I tried using folders for urgent, need to read up on, personal, answer later and so on, but that soon degraded to just answering the urgent ones, which really wasn’t the whole point.
If you work online you’ll get lots of e-mail. My suggestion is that you schedule time for it. Yes, I know that won’t work for most of you, but you’ll most certainly limit the number of times you’ll be interrupted during the day just because it pings in the inbox.
My two cents. How do you tackle this issue?
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I don’t check my email each time I receive a new mail notification. But yes, I have a business email that I like to respond to as soon as it comes because I’ve noticed clients that receive my response quickly are more eager to give me work.
By Amrit Hallan on December 13, 2006 12:24 pm
That is true, since a fast reply can be comforting when you’re looking to do business.
By Thord Daniel Hedengren on December 14, 2006 2:21 am
[...] Contactify is a (supposedly) nice alternative. Of course, if you are ultra popular, you may get too much email disrupting your workflow. In which case, you may need to use an extreme email message classification [...]
By How To Anonymize Your Email Address | 901am on May 3, 2007 9:52 am