By Marsha Egan
Do you respond immediately to emails you receive? I mean...immediately?
Of course you don't. It's everyone else who does.
Here's food for thought: Consider not responding immediately. You'll see that it will become a no-pain, high-gain email handling practice.
"Managers are noticing patterns of immediate email responses from their employees and considering them as indicators of poor desk management habits."
If you feel compelled to respond immediately to everyone who writes you, you are allowing yourself to be interrupted incessantly throughout the day. For professionals in some fields, such as customer service, this is part of their job and these interruptions are expected. But most of us have other work to get done. These interruptions don't help, sapping productivity in a large way.
It's commonly understood that it takes the average worker an average of four minutes to recover from any interruption, not including the actual interruption! So if the average worker is interrupted by only 15 email dings a day, she has lost 60 minutes on recovery time alone. Having your inbox open and dinging and flashing can create many more than 15 interruptions.
The best practice for you is to proactively check your inbox at certain, scheduled intervals. We recommend (at most) five times daily, each about two hours apart. This practice allows you to focus on tasks and work projects for longer periods, uninterrupted by dings and flashes. When you adopt this practice, you will be able to respond in less than two hours.
An effective email scheduler would only check for new messages at the following times:
- Morning
- Midmorning
- After lunch
- Mid-afternoon
- 15-20 minutes before leaving the office
It's interesting to note that the majority of emailers, according to studies, don't expect a response for 24 to 48 hours. When you send an email, you have no idea whether the recipient is at his computer; you don't even know whether he's in the office that day! My guess is that you are in that majority who are not expecting an immediate return.
Consider also the times you were in meetings, some of which may have lasted over an hour. In those cases, you didn't respond immediately, and my guess is that the sky did not fall down.
More and more, managers are noticing patterns of immediate email responses from their employees and considering them as indicators of poor desk management habits. Your consistent pattern of immediate responses could actually be seen as negative, or an area needing attention.
Why then, put unnecessary pressure on yourself to respond immediately? In most situations, a two hour response is more than acceptable.
Email was never intended to be an urgent communication tool. It is an effective, efficient, and inexpensive way to communicate. Let's use it that way.
