Reducing stress of technology

Following on from my recent interview with Deborah Hutton on the Today show and my promise to share more tips with you on ways you can reduce the stress of technology, today’s topic is around email management.

According to an article by Creel Price (“Is Your Smartphone Making You “Leadership Dumb”, July 28, 2014), many people are suffering from “disorders” based around our inability to disconnect – FOMO or fear of missing out and FONK, fear of not knowing.

For many people this inability to disconnect is perpetuated by constantly receiving emails. Of course there’s Facebook updates, Messenger, SMS and a hundred other apps that keep you connected to people but a lot of business owners or employees also receive their work emails through their smartphones.

So I’m going to share with you my top tips for managing email – so that it is not managing you!

Firstly schedule times when you deal with emails. Even if you work in an office it can be difficult to get on with finishing a job if you are distracted every time you receive a new email. Set several windows during the day when you will review and attend to emails. People will soon get to know these or you could put an “out of office” message or add to your email signature to say something like “So that I may devote proper attention to your request I will review and respond immediately to emails between 10am to 11am and 3pm to 4pm daily. If your email is urgent please telephone me on…”. Unless you are a vital health professional or on call specialist, try to avoid responding to emails after hours – it simply creates an expectation that you will reply instantly.

Make sure you turn off the “you’ve got mail” indicators or put them into silent so that you don’t get immediately alerted whenever a new email arrives.

You can also work offline or in airplane mode. Once an email is in your smartphone’s inbox you can compose a reply at leisure and it will be sent when next you go online or turn off airplane mode. This allows you to work on those emails you need to attend to prepare a considered response without the diversion of a new message coming in that you absolutely have to read before you finish replying to the earlier message!

Another effective tool is to manage your emails using folders. I use four folders – Delete, A_Action, A_File, A_Read) and deal with each email as follows:

• If it can be deleted, it goes straight to the Delete folder
• If it takes less than 2 minutes to deal with, I do it then either Delete it or drag it into my A_File folder (the 2 minute guide comes from David Allen, productivity guru)
• If it is for reading, then it is dragged into my A_Read folder for later reading
• If it is for filing (that is, needs to be kept for later reference or legal requirements) then it is dragged into my A_File folder
• Finally, if it is for action, then it is dragged into my A_Action folder

In this way my Inbox is always empty. I can then disconnect my email account (airline mode or offline as mentioned above) and work on the various folders when I have allocated time in my diary.

Hopefully these tips will help you to disconnect occasionally from your emails, at the same time improving your productivity but without sacrificing your responsiveness to clients or friends.

Key tips
•Schedule times when you read and respond to emails
•Turn off all the bells and whistles that tell you “you’ve got mail”
•Work offline or in airplane mode
•Use folders to organise your emails so your Inbox is always empty.