Why working in the email is easy — A simple productivity hack to getting real things done
Have you ever felt the desire to get more emails in your inbox so that you can be busy? “Bring me more, baby, I’ve got this!”
As crazy as it might sound, being busy makes us feel better — because we have the impression that we are getting things done. But busyness is nowhere close to productivity.
Today I wanted to check a few things with some people and I got answers like “I have a lot of emails now, can we do this tomorrow or next week?” While I’m totally fine with this, it made me think.
You know the story: beginning of the year, vacation mood, yet emails piled up while you were away. And even in business as usual mode, email has become the main communication means, especially in large organizations. So you’re stuck. In your email. All day long you reply and reply and by the end of the day you feel happy that you only have 50 emails left to be answered in your inbox, out of the 150. Hurray!
Not me though. Not this time anyway. I only had a few emails, most of them follow-ups to questions or matters I initiated. And after I solved and archived them in nicely organized folders, my screen was blank. Useless to press the Send/Receive button — there was nothing new “to do”.
Getting those “I can’t talk now, I have emails to deal with” type of answers, got me actually longing for some emails to reply. Just to have something to do and be busy with. There’s something about the “busy status” that makes us think it symbolizes productivity.
But ain’t that just a mind trick, trained by companies that want to see us work, not waste time or relax on their money? Busyfing our lives has become a trend. That’s why even when you have 10 minutes free — because you’ve been productive and finished earlier (!) — we feel the urge to fill it with something (Facebook? Twitter? Instagram?). Yet, breaks and mind space are the precondition for creativity and productivity.
But besides the urge for busyness, there was another reason why I felt the need to get more emails in my inbox: because when you have no emails, no requests, you need to organize yourself and really start working. And that’s hard.
Think about it: if there was no email, if it was never invented — if you only had phone and live meetings — would you actually spend an entire day talking and feel you have “done” stuff? Hell no! You might have said you clarified a lot of aspects (which of course can take a big burden off your mind), you can say you now understand the context better and have concrete action steps ahead, but you haven’t really done stuff. Email is fundamentally a communication means, not a getting things done means. One that takes up a lot of time, I might add, especially when compared to the live (much more efficient) communication.
Truth is, working in the email is easy — you have a clear request or question to answer to and once you hit “Send”, you feel like you’ve already ticked something off your to-do list. But the real work starts when you close your email and start creating — coding, designing, finding solutions, making connections.
In fact, complex problem solving, critical thinking and creativity have been rated by organizations around the world in a report done by World Economic Forum as the top 3 skills of the future. And that’s because whether we like it or not, robots and artificial intelligence will replace humans in repetitive job roles. So what will be left for humans to do is what we are in fact — evolutionary speaking — best at: making connections and using knowledge for creating innovation. So it’s doubtful that you’ll get a too fancy job in the future because you can reply emails in record time.
Ok, ok, real work starts outside of email. But you still have your inbox full. What to do?
Well, a brilliant productivity hack is using something that you’ve been only using over holidays: the email autoresponder. Yup, you read that right. Kelly Hoey, cofounder of the WomenInnovateMobile accelerator, or Ryan Holmes, the CEO of HootSuite, got their lives changed only by using the autoresponder on a daily basis. So how can it help you?
When we write emails, we expect immediate responses — the faster, the better. That’s why we also feel bad or guilty when can’t quite catch up with answering instantly and have emails piling up. But what if people knew that you are now actually focusing on something else and you cannot reply in a blink? What if you set an autoresponder during the day, letting people know when they should be expecting replies from you? Something like:
“Hey, thanks for your trust in sending me your inquiry! At the moment I am focusing on project X, so I’ll be able to get back to you after 4pm, when I’ll come back to my email. If there’s something burning, please call me at XXXXXXXX or contact my colleague xxxx@yyy.com”. (Note: please notice that I used “focusing” and not “busy”).
You know, there’s this saying that the recruiter doesn’t mind if you are 5 minutes late for your job interview; they mind because you don’t inform them about it.
It’s the same here: people don’t get mad if they don’t get an instant reply to something that perhaps can anyway wait a few hours or even days, IF they know that you will get to it as soon as you can. But they will surely get mad when you don’t reply AND they have no sense of a time frame when they will get their question answered. That’s when they put you in the “unreliable box”. Although you’re maybe just “busy” replying to all other 100 emails you previously got in your inbox…
For those of you who simply cannot help themselves from checking emails every 5 minutes (or 2 or 3), try DND Email app for Gmail to set do-not-disturb intervals of your choice or simply click on the Work Offline button under the Send/Receive tab in Outlook. And just go to your email when you plan to — when you’re done doing the real work that is ;) — and not when someone else would want you to by sending an email.
So next time you have a day in your email, ask yourself: am I doing business or busyness? (Hint: choose to be an unicorn ;) )
Cheers!
Mihaela.
PS: I am actually happy that I didn’t get any new emails — I got creative and put down this article! :) Best thing about it? It got me in the creative getting-things-done state! Hope it inspires you too — share and get to work! ;)
