Fight The Flab!
How To Lose the Useless Items that Weigh Down Your Day (Part 1)
This isn’t another dieting post. This is about getting rid of the flab that fills your working days: unnecessary activities that weigh you down and make your day tougher to get through. Activities that leave you breathless and exhausted … with little or nothing to show for all that extra effort.
We’ve all got them: bloated in-trays; calendars that contain more junk activities than there are calories in a Mega-Mighty-Gigantic Whoppaburger with triple fries; grotesquely obese work schedules, and an e-mail inbox that fills every 15 minutes.
If you could drop all this useless flab, wouldn’t you feel better? Imagine what a difference it would make to your day … your life … your enjoyment of the world. Time to do what you want to do. Time to get things done. The chance to end the day knowing you’ve accomplished more than you dreamed you could.
Well, you can. It takes effort and self-discipline, but anyone — and that includes you — can do it. Here’s how to get started with controlling useless e-mails. How many of these matter? How many matter enough to interrupt whatever else you are doing?
Almost none. Zilch. Nada. It’s time to get tough with these time and energy thieves. What about blowing away those irritating e-mails and Instant Messages for good?
- If you have Instant Messaging on your computer, turn it off. Now! Better still, remove the hideous abomination altogether. Do not use IM. You don’t need it, unless you’re a pre-teen geek without a life.
- Never keep your e-mail software open all the time. Open it to check for e-mails only when you choose.
- Set fixed times to check for new e-mails and let everyone know when they are. At other times, ignore it.
- Filter everything coming in, so you can sort out what matters from what doesn’t. For e-mails, use the filtering facility in your software.
- Give each one a priority and deal with it when you choose. Only respond immediately to genuine emergencies. Make everyone else wait (and I mean everyone).
- When you send someone an e-mail, make a practice of telling them when you need a response (be specific; say “by Monday at 3.00 p.m.” not “a.s.a.p.”). Ask them to do the same when they e-mail you.
- When you receive e-mail copies that you don’t want, send a polite note to the sender asking them to take you off the circulation list. Don’t stay on the list from inertia, or “just in case” something important comes along. It won’t. Be ruthless. If they don’t take you off the list, use your filtering software to classify that e-mail as “junk” and ignore it.
The worst complaints will come from … yourself. People get addicted to e-mails because of fear. The fear of missing something, being “out of the loop,” or not knowing what’s going on.
Get used to it. Like most fear, it’s irrational. You can either have a sensible work schedule, or give in to your inner demon and waste your time “just in case” you might miss something. Are you too weak to cope with this stupid obsession? Of course not. Kick it out. Bad news travels very quickly and will be sure to reach you. Good news will be a nice surprise when you next check your e-mail. In the meantime, you’ll have a calmer, more productive day.
Next week, I’ll be looking at the curse of cellphones.
P.S. If you want a good way to spend some of the time these tips will save you, please fill out the “Slow Leadership” survey on today’s problems connected with overwork and burnout. You can find it through this link. Thanks.
Adrian Savage is an Englishman and a retired business executive who lives in Tucson, Arizona. You can read his serious thoughts most days at Slow Leadership, the site for anyone who wants to bring back the taste, zest and satisfaction to leadership; and his crazier ones at The Coyote Within.
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Comments
College Cheapskate says on January 17th, 2006 at 9:24 am
Could not agree more with this post. I save so much time now that I don’t have email and instant messengers open. What keeps me from checking email all the time is to only used webmail. It takes more clicks and effort to check it that you might only do it a couple times a day.
One thing this article does not mention is checking news sites constantly instead of once a day. Slashdot.org is a great example of an adicting (must check every 5 minutes) geek news site.
Dan D. says on January 17th, 2006 at 12:11 pm
Awesome post. I used to leave email open all the time, then stopped last year. It’s too easy to start getting inadvertently pushed around by clients or people asking for things. Make yourself the top priority.
Antonio says on January 17th, 2006 at 12:41 pm
I think this is a great article with a couple of quick tips that help you save some minutes quickly and painlessly in your day, I myself have done 2 of the things described in this article.
1) shut down the corporate IM client and if I need to start it I will do it manually and willingso it no longers starts up with windows
2) I check email every 3 hours no rush for me, if somebody really needs me that bad they will locate me (cell phone, extention, etc)
Jeroen Sangers says on January 17th, 2006 at 7:28 pm
I’M and mail are the easy parts. How about the telephone? Do you simply don’t answer them? Do you tell the caller to phone back in 30 minutes (even though you already have been interupted)?
Abullard says on January 17th, 2006 at 11:55 pm
Yikes! If I did this, I would lose my job within a week.
I’m imagining the look on the face of the department director as I tell him: “come and find me if you need me - I’m putting myself first!”
I do try to implement this strategy in my personal life, however, and it does work wonderfully. I hope it works for others professionally as well.
Gary Rogers says on January 18th, 2006 at 12:42 am
I’m with Abullard on this one. IM is a god send in my job, not for chatting, but for supporting the developers that use my servers. It’s much easier to respond to an IM when a developer has a issue than to have the developer standing in my cube demanding all of my attention and engaging the areas in my brain associated with socializing and vocalization rather than typing and reading. I know that sounds strange, but it’s true.
Now… I will say this. I actually have two IM accounts for every service I subscribe to, one for work and one for home. I do NOT open the home one while at work and vice versa.
Utter Doul says on January 18th, 2006 at 1:28 am
I side with Abullard and Gary Rogers - if it weren’t for IM, I would have to waste way more time using the phone trying to get to my team which is spread over multiple locations. IM is way faster than using the phone and playing phone tag. Similar deal with email; I can immediately acknowledge that I will (or will not) work on the issue and a time frame so that I have properly managed the sender’s expectations. This is better than them not receiving any response, wondering what’s up, and then calling me and talking my ear off.
I would rate the phone as the most disruptive of the three, but I can use the other two to minimize phone use to the point that I rarely get called and only in the severest of emergencies. My team and clients know that I will always respond in real time to IM and Email so they never bother me with phone calls
Richm says on January 18th, 2006 at 1:51 am
I learned a long time ago to unplug from email except when I wanted to read it, get up and walk away from a meeting room if it doesn’t start on time, turn off my cell phone or just don’t answer it and deal with the messages on my own time, tell people that walk into my office unanounced that they need to schedule a meeting. The more you unplug the less stress in your life. Take my word for it, very few people need to be plugged in all of the time. I don’t find I miss much at all.
Jon says on January 18th, 2006 at 5:35 am
I think that anyone implementing (most of) these tips would instantly be labelled as a non-team player, and it would impact their career negatively. The exception being the filtering idea, which I like.
korinthe says on January 18th, 2006 at 7:56 am
Actually, most of this is already part of the culture where I work (large FFRDC, most of the staff are technical/professional, not administrative or managerial). It’s a thing of beauty.
If you can’t reach someone at their desk, they’re probably just in the lab, in a meeting, or offsite for the day. That hardly makes them not-team-players.
dice1976 says on January 25th, 2006 at 3:32 am
I do not see how this is effective at all. If you work in an office where you rely on IMs or Email this does not prove to work at all.
I work in support and when emails are coming in with problems or issues it is necessary to have email open all the time. When these issues arise and you need to contact someone who might already be on a phone call IM is the only way to reach them instead of YELLING across a crowded room or having to walk up 2-3 flights to talk to someone.
I can see how this might be effective if you work at home or alone but not for a corporate environment.
Just my 2 cents.
tib says on January 28th, 2006 at 1:25 am
Funny to read this, just a month or two after I stopped logging on to (semi-mandatory) jabber in the morning :o) My colleagues keep insisting, but man, I’m soooo much more relaxed. And if someone from Germany want’s to IM me, they can still ask someone around me, or drop an email. IM’s in the office are among the worst kind of interruptions.
rod says on May 30th, 2006 at 2:33 pm
IM’s can be easily ignored, unlike the phone. I’d hate to not have access to it. Personally, I only check email once an hour at work. I can do that, because I have IM and a phone for urgent things.
As for not being a team player — tib, I’m so glad I don’t sit near you. If someone contacted me and asked me to contact you because you couldn’t be bothered to have IM running, I’d be very unwilling to help you out.
How are your co-workers with being your receptionist?
Some people seem to be managing their contacts to enable them to get work done. Some people are just being rude so that their work-day doesn’t include pesky people trying to make them work.