SpeedFiler Featured on the Cranky Middle Manager Show

I recently had the good fortune to be invited to talk about SpeedFiler and the problems it can solve, in a special Productivity Tools broadcast on Wayne Turmel’s Cranky Middle Manager Show (part of The Podcast Network).

The Cranky Middle Manager Show is an irreverent but insightful look at the world of middle management. Host Wayne Turmel vents, offers humorous commentary and talks to the smartest people in the field about management techniques, career strategies and just keeping it together day after day. If you ever feel stuck between the idiots that make the decisions and the morons who won’t do as they’re told, this is the show for you.

Thanks, Wayne, for the opportunity to participate in your show.

(Tip: listen to the show if you’d like a discount coupon for SpeedFiler.)

Email Bankruptcy Continues to Spread

Today’s Washington Post carries an article about an increasing number of people who find themselves having to declare email bankruptcy.

The article is full of sad cases of people who think that declaring email bankruptcy will solve their problem. It won’t. I’ve talked about why email bankruptcy is worse in some ways than financial bankruptcy, and this shows why email bankruptcy is not a solution.

Just as people without financial skills may find themselves bankrupt, people who lack email and time-management skills will find themselves wanting to declare email bankruptcy. People are usually restricted from starting businesses immediately after a financial bankruptcy. In a similar manner, people who suffer from extreme email overload should ensure they get some training in how to handle their workload before they get back in the game.

It’s not just a skill these people are lacking, though. It’s a way of viewing their inboxes and the place the inbox occupies in their life. I’m always saying that email overload is a state-of-mind, and David Ferris puts this very nicely:

“A lot of people like the feeling that they have everything done at the end of the day. They can’t have it anymore.”

I speak from experience. I once declared “job bankruptcy” — my inability to cope with my workload, in which email played a major part, prompted me to tender my resignation. My boss did not want to accept it, but I was determined. During the time that I worked out my notice, I adopted the Getting Things Done method. All of a sudden, I had more than doubled my productivity and reduced my stress tremendously. GTD worked for me because it solved both the practical and psychological sides of the problem. I found that I could do the job well after all, and I continued working there for another 18 months!

Nagless Reminders — Get the Recipient to Respond On Time and Cut Through their Email Overload

Have you ever had to repeatedly nag someone to deliver on a commitment? What if it’s a commitment that is voluntary, i.e. you’re not the other person’s boss, and you cannot force them to do it? The classic case is trying to get your own boss to deliver on a commitment s/he made to you.

Imagine that you have asked David to review a report, and that he has responded by committing to a self-imposed deadline:

“I’m extremely busy right now, but I’ll have time to review your report on Monday.”

Where do you think your request will be at the beginning of next week? Like many managers, David suffers from chronic email overload, so by Monday it will probably be buried under a few hundred emails in his overflowing inbox. There’s not a snowball’s chance in Hell that he’ll see it and be reminded that he committed to send his feedback.

You will therefore need to remind David of his commitment. But if you become too much of a nuisance, David might not deliver. So, how do you remind him in a nice way, without becoming too much of a nag?

All you need to do is say, “Thanks!”

However, it’s not what you say, it’s when you say it. Don’t reply to David’s message until the time arrives when he promised to work on it.

On Monday, your reply will arrive in David’s inbox, and will subtly remind him of his commitment at exactly the time that he planned to work on it:

“Thanks, David. today will be just in time to fix the document up before the final draft is due. I await your comments eagerly.”

I have used this tactic on many occasions, and have found it very successful. Sometimes you need to help those around you to be a little more productive!

Email Newsletter Study: Surprising Initial Results

I’ve been tracking my newsletter intake over the past week, and I must admit to being rather surprised at the results.

I received only 55 messages from 37 sources that can be described as newsletters, and it took a total of only 72 minutes to read them, including any associated links I was tempted to click on.

Six of these contained at least one piece of information that helps me do my job better, and thirteen messages (from nine sources) managed to pique my interest on subjects that have little bearing on my job.

According to this, approximately 34% of the messages contained something useful or interesting. Does that mean I’m wasting 66% of my time reading useless newsletters just on the off-chance that I’ll find something valuable? Apparently not: 62 out of the total 72 minutes (86%) were spent reading messages from sources that gave useful or interesting information. So I wasted only 10 minutes on useless newsletters. 

This is rather surprising, as I had assumed that I would be able to save a significant amount of time by unsubscribing from the less valuable newsletters. I’m still going to unsubscribe from some of the newsletters, as it will considerably reduce unnecessary inbox clutter.

I’m going to continue measuring for another few weeks, as I need more data points from the newsletters that I receive only once a week. I’m hoping to develop some rules of thumb to help decide what to keep and what to cut.

Email Newsletters: Time Wasters or Valuable Information Sources?

Newsletters seem to take up an incredible amount of space in my inbox. There are some I just can’t bring myself to unsubscribe from, even though I can’t remember the last time I got anything useful out of them. The fear of missing something important is just too great.

In order to help me reduce the amount of rubbish in my inbox and to reduce the time I waste on reading messages “just in case”, I’ve decided to record various statistics about the newsletters I’m subscribed to. I’m then going to analyze the results and see if I can devise a more effective newsletter subscription policy.

I don’t quite know what to measure — this is what I’ll be tracking to start with:

• How long does each newsletter take to read? If I am tempted to click on any links, I’m going to include the time taken to read those web pages too.
• Does it help me get my work done or do it better? If not, does it at least provide information that will probably help in the near future?
• Is it interesting? Is there at least one tidbit of interesting information in it? If I click on a link — it’s a fair sign that it caught my interest.

I’m going to keep this up for a week, and report back here with my findings.

How to expand Outlook’s preview area with a single keystroke

Is your preview area squashed so narrow that you can’t comfortably read messages in Outlook’s main window? I’ll show you how you can use a single keystroke to expand it to read your messages, and then contract it again. This is an incredibly simple tip, but I’m amazed at how much it has changed my email experience.

By default, Outlook divides its main window into three sections: navigation pane, message list and the preview area. If you don’t have a wide screen, the preview area is squashed up against the right hand side, and is not really comfortable to use for reading messages — just for scanning them to see if they need to be opened in a separate window for more attention.

This frustrates me, as I like to use the main window for actually reading my messages. I’ve tried widening the preview area at the expense of narrowing the message list, but if the message list is too narrow, it will take up 2 lines for each message, i.e. show only half the number of messages as before — not good, since I also like to see as much of my inbox as possible in a single glance.

Recovering from Email Bankruptcy

Robert Scoble says he is close to declaring “email bankruptcy.”

I don’t believe he’ll take the drastic step of deleting all his mail and notifying all of his contacts that he’s starting again, because in some ways, email bankruptcy is similar to financial bankruptcy:

• it can have a catastrophic effect on your reputation;
• you need a recovery plan, otherwise you’ll be in trouble again soon.

However, if email bankruptcy would really be like financial bankruptcy, people would stop sending you emails (extending credit), because they would not not trust you to answer them (repay debt). Is that good or bad?

Actually, a closer look at Scoble’s post shows that his problem is not the large volume of email he gets. His inbox is clean, and his messages are all triaged into various folders. His problem seems to be in finding the time to perform all the actions related to the 1537 triaged emails. I would hazard a guess that the root of the problem is that he’s over-committing. Each time we read a message and file it away in an “Action” folder, we are making a commitment to ourselves to handle it at a later date. It’s all too easy to make too many such commitments. It’s nothing to do with email itself — that’s just a communications medium which triggers most of our commitments, and email programs make it too easy for us to pile up these commitments without realizing how overcommitted we are.

My advice to Robert, if indeed this is his problem, is to take his own advice and get back on the GTD wagon. GTD makes us keep a list of projects and a list of next actions. If an incoming email triggers a new project, it is instantly clear to us whether we have room for it now, whether we’ll have to defer it to a later date, or even decline it altogether. Since I adopted GTD, it’s become much easier for me to say “no” when that’s the honest answer, and also much easier to say “yes,” knowing I’ll be able to honor the commitment.

How many emails to set up a meeting?

You want to meet. The other party wants to meet. You have a common interest in meeting. You’ve agreed to meet, but now you have to work out the logistics. How many emails and/or phone calls will it take to set it up?

A recent 90-minute meeting with someone from another company took a total of fifteen (15) emails back-and-forth and two phone calls to set up, over the space of a few days.

I won’t bore you with details, which included working with both of my counterpart’s personal assistants, each based in a different country, and reacting to changing travel plans. This was an extreme case, but not by much.

Would you bet your life on email?

Email is critical part of company infrastructure and business processes, yet it is so structureless. This lack of structure is what makes it so ubiquitous — it’s easy to use it for everything. However, it can be extremely unreliable where strict business workflows must be followed.

If your life depended on it, would you choose email as your preferred method of communications? Too many things can go wrong, at both the sending and receiving ends, and I’m not talking about purely technical glitches.

How easy is it to accidentally delete someone from the list of recipients, or mistype someone’s name or address so that it goes to John Doe instead of John Smith?

Now compare this relative fragility with the potential damage it can cause. It boggles the mind. Here’s an example from earlier this year:

Use Your Email Signature To Set Expectations

Bob Walsh includes the following line at the bottom of his email signature:

(I usually check email every few hours during the day.)

What a great idea! People who correspond with Bob now know that: 

• he does not allow incoming email to disturb what he’s doing (he practices GTD), but
• he’ll definitely read your message within a few hours.

I’m going to adopt this idea with a slight tweak, and add the following to my email signature:

I usually check email every couple of hours during the day, and I reply to most messages within 24 hours.

This won’t stop the odd idiot from calling up to ask if I’ve seen the email he just sent me, but I am confident that it will help to train the rest of my environment to interact with me more efficiently.

How quickly would you be fired for being stoned on pot at work?

Or to rephrase this, how quickly would you be fired for multi-tasking at work?

A 2005 study by the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College, London shows that people who allow themselves to be constantly interrupted by email and instant messaging perform slightly worse than those who are stoned on pot.

How to reply to all email messages within 24 hours, consistently

Do you ever get frustrated when someone does not reply to your messages within 24 hours? Isn’t it fun to work with people who reply only after you’ve politely (but persistently) badgered them a few times?

As I used to be one of these overloaded individuals, I can tell you that they only reply to two types of people: those whose cooperation they need in order to get their own job done, and those who badger them persistently enough to make them feel uncomfortable or embarrassingly inefficient.

As I said, I used to be one of these people. I now consistently reply to almost all of my email within 24 hours. So how do I maintain my responsiveness?

When are two emails better than one?

Contrary to what you might think, there is one case where it's better to send a series of emails to one person, rather than cram everything you have to say into one message.

Multiple, short emails can sometime create less overload than a single large email, and can be much more efficient. When is this the case? When you're delegating multiple unrelated tasks or asking multiple unrelated questions which require more than a one-sentence answer.

How can Responsiveness help your Professional Reputation?

Adam Boettiger takes the bus to work, and recently overheard the following:

“You know, Bob really doesn’t do email well. You really should use the phone to reach him.”

Robert Scoble‘s wife Maryam likes Scott Guthrie, a General Manager at Microsoft, just because:

“He always answers his email.”

Getting such a busy person to respond consistently, reflects just as much on Maryam Scoble’s email writing skills, so I would hazard a guess that Scott thinks highly of her too.

If people’s opinion of you were based solely on your email responsiveness, can you imagine what they would think of you?

How to Keep Track of Overdue Responses

If you interact with more than three people at work, and especially if you are in a matrix management position, do you find it difficult to answer the following question:

Who still owes me a reply to a message I sent?

Unless you have a system to track the requests you send via email, only when you actually need the information as input to another task, will you remember, for example, that Jim hasn’t reviewed those figures you emailed him last week. At this point, if the response hasn’t arrived, it’s almost too late because you cannot get on with your own work, and your own schedule and commitments are affected.

Here’s a trick for keeping track:

Small Change Makes Big Difference to Email Prioritization: How to Color-code Your Messages

Color-coding your messages can help you significantly with triage, the process of prioritizing your messages.

The most significant improvement for me is the rule that colors messages blue, if I am the only recipient on the TO: line. Such messages are most likely to be more important that the rest of the stuff that fills up my inbox, because:

• They have not been sent to a bunch of people, but specifically to me.
• They are therefore more likely to relate to my area of responsibility.
• They are also more likely to require action.
• If I don’t answer, nobody else will. (Read some interesting background information about this.)

In Microsoft Outlook, it’s very easy to define such a rule. On the menu in the main Outlook window, just click on Tools | Organize. This will display the following panel above the messages:

You can create additional rules using the Automatic Formatting… link at the top-right of the panel.

The Pandora Effect: The Psychological Value of an Empty Inbox

An inbox which is full to the brim is (for me, at least) a stress-generating liability. There is too much undefined work lurking in the pile of unread and read-but-unhandled messages. The read-but-unhandled messages are the worst culprits. Unhandled does not mean that you have not completed the work that the message defines, it means that you have not yet decided what work the message requires of you. Once you’ve decided and recorded what actions you need to take, it’s no longer “stuff”, and you can get rid of it (file it or delete it). It’s very tempting to scan a message and not decide what to do about it. You’ll revisit such messages quite a few times, until they are buried too deep under other “stuff”, and will probably not resurface until it’s too late. You then start to approach your inbox with apprehension — who knows what is lurking in there…

Are Better Tools the Solution to Email Overload?

Email overload and ways of fighting it are being discussed more and more as time goes on. Many vendors are selling tools that are aimed at making our email experience more productive. Some of them are very well thought of, e.g. ClearContext Inbox Manager.

Even though I’m a tool vendor myself, I want to make it clear that better software cannot solve email overload. Better software can just alleviate the dire situation we’re all in. Two quite varied examples are anti-spam products and automatically color-coding your messages according to various criteria.

Don’t be fooled by any marketing message that says [product] will solve your email overload problems. It won’t. It can’t. Only you can solve your problems.

How I was bitten by the Productivity Bug

Hi! I finally got around to starting a blog, which is quite surprising because I’m opinionated and generally have lots to say. Which does not, however, mean that anyone wants to listen.

One topic that is close to my heart and about which I have hard evidence that a few people are willing to listen, is how to cope with email overload.

Until recently, as a rather busy vice president in a security appliance company, I would receive 100 to 150 emails a day that somehow slipped through our spam filter, probably because they were related to my work in some remote way. The company culture was extremely collaborative, meaning that if you did something you were proud of, or had a marvellous idea (in your very subjective opinion), you rushed off an email to anyone in the company who in your opinion might marvel at your brilliance, or who ought to act on your wonderful idea.