Communicating Email Efficency
management, software development
Always use caution with email. Even an innocent signature line communicating the fastest way to reach you can be misconstrued.
I read Tim Ferris’s book a few months ago. Many different ideas on how to be more effective using less time. I tested out the idea of batching email and only checking it twice per day. Checking email at only 12:00 and 4:00 and batch processing saves at least 30 minutes per day. Successful experiment!
I had a simple addition to my signature line to explain this.
Due to increased workload I’m checking email twice per day at 12:00 and 4:00. Please call me on my cell at 555.555.55555 if you need to reach me sooner.
I got a bit of helpful feedback from another manager a few days ago. The suggestion was to maybe reword the signature line as some people might have construed it in a negative light. Email is dangerous that way, lack of context can lead people to the wrong conclusions.
The email explanation signature is gone now. The real gift was another manager comfortable enough to give feedback.
Ed Gibbs @ August 30, 2007
This was a comment from Todd Costello (mistakenly deleted during an upgrade.
Hey Ed,
I too just finished this book and I found many of the ideas quite interesting. Have you received any feedback from your team and/or senior management about your e-mail usage? I suspect that e-mail is the primary means of communication in your shop (as in ours). Do people glitch at something going unread to for (gasp) four hours? Have you found your walk-ups/phone calls increasing ?
I’m thinking of doing this myself and would rather live with the checking of e-mails if it comes at a cost of ringing phones and people hovering over my desk.
Todd
The feedback from my team is that they now realize they can just handle a lot of the smaller things without emailing me. Self-empowerment is a good thing.
I don’t get anymore walk-ups/phone calls then before, but now more of them are interruptions I should be getting like the server is down. Before sometimes people would send email and assume I would read it. Problem was I often have mornings or afternoons packed with meetings and I didn’t see the email until it was too late to act on it.
I’d recommend trying it out for a week, just be careful with wording your explanation.