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"You control your life by controlling your time."
– Conrad Hilton
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Email has changed the way we conduct our academic lives. Often it is our first choice means of contacting people – even colleagues sitting down the hall. But are we using the medium wisely?
Some of us react immediately when we receive a new email message. We operate as though we were physicians and our email program is the pager that informs us we are needed at the hospital. When we react in “emergency mode”, we allow external cues to control our time.
Instead, we can decide to be doctors with a nine to five practice who have no “on call” duties. Wouldn’t life be calmer if we didn’t treat our email as though it was an emergency pager?
To manage our time wisely, and keep work demands from taking over our lives, we need to take conscious control of our email habits.
In a previous Monday Motivator, I gave five tips for dealing with email. Here are six more tips to help you manage your electronic mail.
1) Try using a timer to measure how long you spend on email.
Are you aware how much of your day is spent dealing with electronic mail? Many of us promise ourselves that we’ll read and answer messages just for a few minutes, but we get wrapped up in our inboxes and lose track of time. We emerge much later than planned, surprised by how the electronic medium has just sucked up a large chunk of our limited work time.
2) Don’t automatically respond to email messages every time you check your inbox.
Choose whether an incursion into your inbox is for the general purpose of dealing with new mail or whether it is going to be a quick entry to send a specific message. Practice the challenging art of sending the email you intend without replying to other people’s requests.
3) Jot down your goals for each email session.
Are you someone who gets sidetracked by new messages? I’ve been known to open my email program in order to send a specific message, but somehow I get seduced by new mail, spend a half hour or more cleaning up my inbox, and only realize after I’ve logged out that I’ve forgotten to send the very message that motivated the session. Does this ever happen to you? Now I quickly make a note of the messages I need to send and start with my top priorities.
4) Find out what your most productive colleagues are doing.
Take an informal survey and ask several professors how they deal with their email. Some high achievers check their inbox innumerable times each day, but many prolific professors set strict limits to keep from having their time controlled by email. Ask whether they have a system and how well it works for them.
5) Think through the role that email should play in your workday.
Are you someone who needs to be at the beck and call of every incoming message? In certain cases, the answer to this question will be “yes.” One professor I know is collaborating with colleagues from other universities to run medical research projects in Africa. Most of his research administration takes place via email and it is necessary for him to spend two or three hours each day fielding up to 100 work-related email messages. For most of us, however, being so readily available electronically is unnecessary. Constantly checking for new messages may be a form of procrastination and our research might progress faster if we were on email less often.
6) Don’t waste your “prime time” on email.
If you are most alert and productive first thing in the morning, why do you spend your first hour at work going through your inbox? One of my coaching clients was the Dean of a prestigious private college. She received over 100 new, important email messages each day. After experimenting with different ways of managing this information onslaught, she made it a practice never to check her email until 3pm. She chose this period of the afternoon because her energy level tended to be low during that time. She was confident that if she allowed email to suck up her morning vigor she would never accomplish her goals. Keeping the demands of email in check helped her get her job done. (She also found that when people had to wait a few hours or a day for her reply they sometimes solved their problems without her.)
The basic premise of these tips is to control your email rather than allow it to control you.
Question: What would happen if each time you started to open your email browser you first asked yourself “What is the best use of my time, right now?”
Answer: You’d become much more productive.
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