Color Me Efficient

According to time management experts, one minute of interruption costs 15 minutes of productivity and concentration and once off-task, it can take you up to 15 minutes to regain your mental flow. When you consider all of the “one minutes” you spend throughout the day checking e-mail, that’s a lot of lost productivity. Translate that lost productivity into lost revenue, and it’s a bigger problem. When you are constantly checking and responding to e-mail, you are letting someone else set your agenda and distract you from your work. What’s worse is that the majority of e-mails you receive each day are non-urgent, meaning they could have been handled either by you later or by someone else entirely. How can you deal with the amount of e-mail landing in your inbox? Think of managing it as an administrative task and delegate.

If you have an assistant, managing your inbox should be one of their tasks. Have them screen all of your e-mail, prioritizing the correspondence that requires your attention and answering any e-mails that are related to scheduling, billing, computer problems or other administrative tasks. If you don’t have an assistant, consider hiring a virtual assistant or assigning the task to another staff member. Remember, using an employee’s time will free up yours. Don’t worry; you won’t be disconnected from clients and employees. You can develop an e-mail filtering system with your staff, who can bring the important items to your attention.

The Color Code

There are never enough hours in your day, but prioritizing e-mail can help you decide what to tackle immediately and what can wait until the train ride home. The first step to efficient e-mail prioritization is to develop a coding system with your designated staff member. For example, have that person color-code all of your e-mail — red, blue, green and black. The red e-mails are the ones that require immediate action. Blue e-mails are items you don’t have to read right away, but they could be important and should be responded to in the next few days. A green e-mail will most likely be an “FYI.” Finally, everything that’s not color-coded (still black) but has been read is e-mail that your staff has answered or taken care of already. Of course you must train your staff to answer any e-mails related to scheduling, billing, computer problems or other administrative tasks to make the color code system really work for you.

Training the Assistant

There are two levels of training: long-term and short-term. The short-term training is for the types of e-mails that you want coded red (most important). For example, you might say, “The most important thing to me is my clients. If they have a problem, other than scheduling or billing, I have to look at those immediately.” That will take some judgment on the part of your assistant, so you need to sit with him or her in the beginning and go through your e-mail priorities together. Inform your clients that your assistant screens your e-mail. If you deal with confidential issues, have your assistant sign a confidentiality agreement, and make them well aware of which messages are meant for your eyes only. These are coded red.

If you allow your assistant to handle e-mail requests for meetings, provide scheduling ground rules. For example, if you work at home on Friday, let the assistant know not to schedule any meetings for that day. Or, if you aren’t an early bird, tell your assistant you are not available for meetings or calls before 9 a.m., or that you don’t mind being called in the evening. You can also allocate time in your calendar for appointments.

Benefits

The coding system is also beneficial to business owners going out of town on business or on vacation. A simple phone call can keep you up to date on your red-coded e-mails instead of constantly checking the BlackBerry. Here is how the system has been effective in my office: Let’s say I’ve been away from my computer all day. In my inbox, I’ve got blues and greens left over from yesterday that I have to address and about 25 new e-mails, all color coded. Now, of those 25, my assistant handled 12 on her own, 11 are coded as red (which really makes me happy because that’s only about an hour I need to spend on e-mail) and the rest are blues and greens. And, to tell the truth, sometimes I never get to the greens (the FYIs), and so far, there have been no disasters!

Besides saving you valuable time, there is another, critical benefit to prioritizing your e-mail. Since you are tied to your inbox only at certain times of the day, you will be in a better place mentally to work on revenue generating projects. You’ll have better focus and you’ll be able to direct more of your energy toward growing your business.