Manage E-mail Overload to Reclaim Lost Productivity

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending a workshop hosted by Becky McKinstry of Open Lines called A New Outlook. The workshop was designed for small business owners to gain a new perspective on how they conduct sales in their organization. One of the things I learned from the workshop was how we as business owners spend our time.

In business, you can usually break your activities down into two groups.

• Pay-line activities
• Non pay-line activities

Pay-line activities are the things you do on a daily basis that bring in income directly or indirectly. It can be the work you bill clients for, making sales calls, networking, writing proposals, or drafting contracts. Non pay-line activities are the things you do that don’t generate income like when you spend the morning planning what you’ll do for the rest of the day, organizing files, bookkeeping or accounting and sifting through your e-mail.

In this post I want to specifically focus on e-mail because it has been known, and is still remains, the ultimate time-suck for any business professional or entrepreneur. According to Becky, the ideal scenario for any business owner should be 70% of your time devoted to pay-line activities and 30% to non pay-line activities.

A book by John Freeman called the Tyranny of E-mail shows us just how much of a detriment this method of communication has on our business and what we can do to tame it. It’s estimated that the average corporate worker spends 40% of their day just on e-mail, sending and receiving approximately 200 messages a day.

Freeman advocates what he calls the Slow Communication Movement and it begins with looking at e-mail in a different light. E-mail is not a world unto itself. It is a tool for the betterment of our work and our life and not a world we live within.

While much of this runs counter to what we’re conditioned to believe in business, there’s much to be said about going back to direct person-to-person contact, picking up the phone and placing a call and setting limits as to how often you’ll check your e-mail and how often you’ll use it in your business. It’s worth giving it a try. If this method to managing how and when you communicate with others is not effective, there are many other techniques you can try. It’s all about what works best for you and what helps you focus on the important things, like pay-line activities.

Further Reading

To learn more about productivity and managing e-mail in your day to day work, check out the following post at the old TVCNet Legacy Blog.

• Productivity for Consultants - The Inbox Zero Philosophy