Is email helping or hurting you?

How much of your day would estimate is given to email? Have you ever used email to avoid a harder or less pleasant task?

Hi folks. Steve Hammond here from HorselessRanch.com.

According to a training seminar I recently attended, 60%-70% of most peoples’ work effort is spent on something other than what would be most productive/profitable. In other words, most of us are not making the best use of our time.

Let me ask you if you what email is to your job. Are you being paid to constantly monitor email, phone, or messaging? Or is email simply supposed to be a tool related to what your job description calls for you to do? A few of us might be what I call “dispatchers.” That is, our job is continuously monitor incoming messages.

However, most of us are being paid to produce something, repair something, or otherwise get a project accomplished. Email is not our main job. It is supposed to help us get our job done.

So what happens when email begins to keep us from doing our main job(s)? It is no longer a helpful tool. It has become a distraction.

Do you know that many people have come to use email as a way to appear to be working, when in reality, they are avoiding the work they are supposed to be doing? When a task is complicated, or undesirable, some folks will check email as an avoidance mechanism.

Why not schedule when you will check email and text messages. Perhaps you can turn off the alerts (sounds and vibrations) that distract you from more important work. Only you know how often you need to check email. Try to make sure you don’t check it too often.

Here’s another idea. Why not put in your email signature a line that tells when you will check email to reduce the expectation that you will respond immediately. Make sure you don’t respond immediately.

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Well, that’s it for today.

If you are needing an event speaker, a workshop leader, or a training, please remember – “I make folks unfireable.”