Is Your Email Killing Your Effectiveness at Work?
Email can be a very effective tool for communication – as long as you’re using it appropriately. Yet for most business owners, when you’re taking care of emails, you’re not doing the important work ON your business.
Less time on email means more time for focus work on the important things that move your business forward. Your business email policy has to balance the need for communication with the need for everyone on the team, including you, to have time to concentrate on important tasks.
As a business owner, I have to answer emails right away!
Although many clients tell me this at first, we discover as we work together that this isn’t true. We’ve all been trained – yes, me too – to answer them right away.
But are the emails you receive so urgent that someone will die or be seriously injured when you don’t answer right away?
Think about emails that you send out to prospects or vendors. Most of the time, you’re looking for an acknowledgment that the person you sent it to received the email. You want to be sure you’re on their radar.
But for the most part, you’re not expecting an answer right away. If you were, you’d probably call or text. Right?
Have you ever sent an email out and received an autoresponder? Maybe the person is out of the office, or maybe they only check their emails at certain times of the day and they’re letting you know that they got your email and will check it later.
How did you respond to that? Did you vow never to do business with them again? Did it make you angry?
Or did you, like a rational person, think, OK, they’ll get to it later. You might not even have read the whole email because you just wanted to know the other person received it. If you got an out-of-office reply, you might have called or emailed to discuss with someone else at the company.
So if that’s how you approach an autoresponder, why do you assume other people will respond differently?
If you’re currently responding to emails as they come in, how much time could you save by sending automatic responses?
Batching tasks like email improves your time management
Human brains didn’t develop and adapt to surroundings that were fast-paced, technical, and involved in doing lots of different tasks. That work environment has been around for less than 50 years. The human brain doesn’t like to switch from task to task because it’s tiring.
So when you’re working on something, get distracted by an email, take care of the email, and then go back to the task, it fatigues your brain. It’s much more efficient and easier for your brain to handle a bunch of emails all at once.
Batching them during a time of low energy and effort for your brain is also a big booster for productivity in the workplace. Save your thinky work for the times your brain is best able to handle those tasks, and take care of email and admin the rest of the day.
I’m a bear sleep chronotype (think middle of the day, not night owl or early bird). My focus time is best between 9 and 1 (we only get about four hours of deep work a day.) So I often won’t look at emails until after lunch.
I’ve clearly communicated this to everyone, so no one’s expecting a response from me at 7 am. Also, most of my emails aren’t urgent – they may be important, but immediate answers aren’t necessary.
Email notifications torpedo productivity in the workplace
One of the key drivers of productivity – not busy-ness but accomplishing the tasks that move you forward – is the ability to concentrate on one task. Can you concentrate when you’re continuously interrupted?
It doesn’t matter whether or not you’re neurotypical, constantly being distracted breaks your focus. This is why so many entrepreneurs work long hours – they’re constantly distracted by notifications and interruptions, so they don’t get the focus time they need.
Not only is your concentration broken in the moment that your email notification pops up, whether that’s a text on your screen, a vibration, or a chime. But it can take up to 23 minutes to get back to where you were on the task.
Another way to say this is: if you get two email notifications an hour, you may only get about 15 minutes of that hour to do your work.
And you wonder why you’re busy all the time and work such long hours. Out of your hour, you get 15 minutes of solid work. That’s how destructive your email notifications are to your productivity.
And if you’re a business owner, that’s how much email destroys the focus for your staff. Have six team members doing cognitively demanding work? That should give you 360 work minutes per hour (6*60 minutes in an hour.) But you’re only getting about 90 work minutes (6*15).
Still not sure about time management and email notifications?
Sometimes having email urgency is almost a badge of honor – just like busy-ness. But if you still think that you have a lot of important emails that need to be answered right away, test your theory. Call it the National Email Week challenge.
Categorize all your emails for a few days this week into the following buckets:
Action items to be handled ASAP – meaning they couldn’t wait even one hour to be dealt with. If you didn’t respond to this email immediately, then it doesn’t go into this bucket.
Emails from customers
People trying to schedule something with you, whether friends, colleagues, vendors, or whoever
Notifications from online groups, whether “social” media or something else
Newsletters that you read regularly
Newsletters you don’t read
Ads, people you don’t remember, things you signed up for
Other
At the end of the week, tally up how many you have in each bucket.
The only emails that you need notifications for are the ones in the first action bucket. If you have zero, then you don’t need email notifications at all.
It doesn't mean you’re not important, but probably people communicate urgent and important things in other ways besides email to you. Which means you don’t need email notifications on.
Remember, turning off email notifications doesn’t mean that you never read or attend to your emails. It means that you take care of them all at once at a time you yourself choose instead of allowing them to break your concentration.
Recap (tl;dr):
Although many businesspeople believe that emails must be read immediately, that’s not true for the most part. There are ways to handle emails so they don’t interrupt your flow by tiring out your brain, and these methods also increase your productivity.
Are you so effective at work that you’ve been able to cut back to only the occasional long day? Do you go home guilt-free because you know you accomplished so much during the day?
Don’t feel bad if your answer to either (or both) is No, because you’re not alone. But do schedule your free consultation with me by finding my calendar here to see how I can help you reclaim your time.