Imagine a place so vast that many things enter, but often never return. A place that can take hours out of a day with your full permission.
Now imagine this place currently exist on your phone or your computer.
I’m not talking about Candy Crush
It’s your email inbox.
Questions never answered, acknowledgments never received, cat videos never played, a Nigerian King whose inheritance is doomed all live here
How do we manage this vast wasteland where ordinary rules of communication don’t seem to apply?
Your Busy
I get it.
No matter what the economy is doing, the only thing that is showing consistent growth is my email inbox.
I have inadvertently forgotten to reply or send my fair share of emails over my career.
In today’s workplace we have all gotten extremely busy, it has become a supply vs demand problem. There is only one of one of you versus an endless parade of emails.
Historically if you wanted time with someone you actually had to schedule a face to face meeting with them. Email has removed the barrier for access and now employees can email anyone in the organization.
That’s a great thing.
However, the corollary is that person receiving the email isn’t any less busy than if you had tried to schedule a meeting to ask the same question.
A 2012 study by the consulting firm McKinsey found that the average worker spent 28% of their time on email and an additional 20% trying to find information to answer questions from the email
Just Reply
Imagine if we treated our conversations the way we treat email.
“Bob, I was wondering how to handle a simple question that is preventing us from receiving payment for this multi million-dollar account?”
**silence***
“Bob, your standing right in front of me. I can see you. Can you just answer the question?”
**silence**
“If you are not going to answer the question can you at least acknowledge you heard me, like maybe nodding your head or giving me a wink?”
Several weeks later you run into Bob in the company cafeteria.
“Bob, just checking in to see if you had a chance to follow up on that question I asked you a couple of weeks ago that you never answered, even though I know you heard me because you were standing right in front of me?”
**silence**
We often find ourselves trying to give the other party an excuse for not replying.
“Hey, I know you have been busy, but have you had a chance to follow up on….”
“Sorry to keep bugging you, but…”.
I think in our reliance on email communication we have forgotten some of the tenants of basic communication.
Like responding.
Don’t read on the fly
Our smartphones have made it easier than ever to check email and this is not necessarily a good thing. A recent study found that the average worker checks their email on average 15 times a day!
Reading email on your phone while you are walking to your next meeting may make you feel super-efficient it can have some unintended consequences (other than running into a wall or stepping on a cat).
Namely you walk into your next meeting and forget about the email you just read which needs a reply. While you are sitting in the meeting you accumulate another 20-30 emails and suddenly that initial email is gone forever.
Try to hold off looking at emails until you have some dedicated time to work through them. This usually is not on your phone during a meeting. In his Harvard Business Review article Matt Plummer recommends checking your email hourly.
If you really can’t do this then try to mark important emails as unread that so that you will remember that you need to address it.
Don’t Get Snarky
Too often things escalate into a passive aggressive slug fest.
“Robbie, I am just following up to see if you had a chance to look at the email I sent back on 2/14/19 at 10:30am. I know the read receipt says you opened it on 2/15/19 at 9:30 am. I’ve also included your boss and my boss on the email to display the importance of this email and to also make you look like you don’t know what you are doing. Looking forward to hearing back from you.”
We have all experienced this.
I think we often assume that folks are intentionally ignoring us, not that we are all human and over the course of 100+ emails a day we may have forgotten one or two.
Just Pick up The Phone
We have this new technology called a phone. If something is that important, you can always pick up the phone and call.
Recently I had a situation where I was on the receiving end of not getting a response to an email. I made the bold move of actually calling the person and in 5 minutes we made more progress than 3 or 4 back and forth emails.
It’s a two-way street
Despite all the positive benefits of email I think we often tell ourselves stories when it appears our email has been forgotten. This leads to built up frustration and passive-aggressive email wars.
We often forget that the alternative is actually talking with the person, which can often solve the problem quickly.
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