Email - Are You Managing It or Is It Managing You?

I wonder sometimes whether we are managing all of the technology that is at our disposal in today’s world, or whether in fact it is managing us. Many of the technological improvements aimed at making us more efficient, may actually be hurting our effectiveness as managers. Email surfaces as an issue with most managers that I work with.

I have yet to hear a manager complain to me that they aren’t receiving enough emails and want suggestions on how to get more. Most managers feel overwhelmed by the amount of electronic mail that they are receiving. Here are a few tips on managing email.

Begin by educating people on exactly what type of information you want to receive and how you want to receive it. Lengthy emails are very cumbersome to read and manage – the norm for emails is that they be limited to one page that can be displayed on a screen. Rather than receive multiple emails from the same person, encourage them to combine into one email.

Remove your name from the distribution of lists of any regular reports that you do not read each time they are sent to you.If you receive ezines or online newsletters and to save the articles for future reading or reference, set up a separate folder and change the subject line of the email to the title of the article or articles you want to see retrieve in the future. I save some articles and I always make the subject line something that will let me know exactly what was in the newsletter that I wanted to save.

Keep your inbox empty. someone for action, or file it. Establish a filing system that makes retrieving emails easy and straightforward. It is very inefficient to have to go back through every message in your inbox every time you look at your email. Also, use the search feature to retrieve old emails that you have saved. Recently, I wanted to find some data that was in a slide show that someone sent me. I knew I had saved the email somewhere, but couldn’t remember exactly where. I simply entered the person’s same and one word from the subject, and found the message immediately. It saved me from going through multiple folders and emails to find what I needed.

Check your email once or twice a day, rather than continuously. When people get an immediate response to an email, they make the assumption that you are sitting at the computer terminal waiting for the next email. Once people understand that you have more important things to do than wait on the next email, they will learn to contact you by other means if there is something urgent that needs your attention.

When we communicate a message to another person face-to-face, three factors come into play – the words we use, the tone of voice we use, and our body language. Powerful communicators learn to match all three of these to maximize the effectiveness of communication. Dr. Albert Mehrahian’s famous study in the 1970’s showed that words only conveyed 7 percent of the message, while tone accounted for 38 percent and body language the other 55 percent. When we communicate by email, we are using only words, the factor which has the least impact on conveying a message.Email is most effective in conveying facts and data, not eliciting emotional responses.