Bad email can hurt your project

I finally finished reading, “The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox.”

Loved the book. It was a very interesting read about how communication has changed with the advent of, well, literacy, then postal service, then typewriters, then telegraph, and finally email. At each step, certain core assumptions and behaviors changed in our society. It was fun to read about the historical complaints about piles of written correspondence to manage, complaints that were nearly word-for-word the same as modern complaints about email volume. There are great tidbits throughout the book that can improve how you balance your email and control it instead of it controlling you.

In my organization, we’ve begun adopting some email best practices as outlined in another book, The Hamster Revolution: How to Manage Your Email Before It Manages You (Bk Business). Freeman makes very similar recommendations throughout his book, “Tyranny.”

They’ve probably leveraged some of the same research.

Any challenge to effective communication will be a challenge to your project, and email is a primary communication channel (pit) for many of us these days. So managing it better can directly impact your project.

In the final chapter of “Tyranny,” Freeman makes some recommendations under the general title, “Don’t Send.” Here they are, with some of my ideas of how they relate to your projects.

Rule	Project Application
1. Don’t Send	Sending less means you get less. Sending less makes you focus communication and make it more meaningful. It makes you consider alternative channels, such as short meetings or phone calls that may be more effective.
2. Don’t Check It First Thing in the Morning or Late at Night	Less about projects, and more about your ability to manage email instead of it managing you. Give yourself the down time. Let other things e more important for a few minutes. If you can let your mind run free, you may find new ideas for solving some project problems. If your mind is constantly spent on email, it can’t be spent on other things.
3. Check It Twice A Day	You set your agenda for the day instead of letting email set your agenda. Make email an item on the agenda, not the other way around. Be fully engaged on whatever you’re doing, including being fully engaged in email when it’s time to do email. Your emailed status updates will likely be better. Your project scheduling will also turn out better if you’re not constantly interrupted by email.
4. Keep a Written To-do List and Incorporate E-mail into It	OK, I’m not yet sold on this. Breaking most time management rules, I have multiple to-do lists, or multiple inboxes, as David Allen talks about in “Getting Things Done.” I manage a To-do list in my email box and after some trial and error, it works quite well. I’ve also developed the discipline not to pounce on every new message in the in box. I’m just fine letting them stack up and getting to them later when I’ve planned on it. So, managing a To-do list in my email account has worked OK. You judge for you. The idea is not to digitize the list, Freeman says, and to separate the time management from the technology, subjecting the email to the list and not the other way around.
5. Give Good E-mail	Write clear subject lines. Write short emails. Action items up front.
6. Read the Entire Incoming E-mail Before Replying	Duh. But you know you’re guilty of not doing it. You’re more apt to provide meaning email (see rule 5) if you read it through. Then, you can give a proper answer. You’re also likely to come across as much more civil and in control. No one trusts a harried PM, so be sure you don’t look harried in email.
7. Do Not Debate Complex or Sensitive Matters by E-mail	That goes double for project communications. In my technical shop, we stumble over this all the time, trying to troubleshoot or replan a design via email! 30 minutes and 30 messages later, everyone quites ready except a few die-hards. Schedule a meeting.
8. If You Have to Work as a Group by E-mail, Meet Your Correspondents Face-to-Face	Yes, really. If you can’t fly them in, then use SKype or other video chat service. Spend time together, even virtually. Make time for the niceties in meetings. Celebrate personal things like birthdays or weddings or grandchild births. Help the team see each other as people, not resources, and business runs more smoothly.
9. Set Up Your Desk to Do Something Else Besides E-mail	Make your computer subject to your workspace, not the other way around. Leave room on your desk for thinking.
10. Schedule Media-free Time Every Day	“We were not born to e-mail, download, watch YouTube, and play online games,” writes Freeman. Be aware of the other things in your environment, in your life. Be present there. My best ideas on projects come while I’m knitting on the car pool on the way home. (Yes, I knit.) Or while I’m doing homework with the kids — which I don’t do nearly often enough. I’ve learned to take a pad of paper with me to the soccer game, because as I relax and my mind relaxes as I enjoy watching the kids, ideas pop into my head — ideas I wouldn’t have had if I still had a Blackberry.

Related posts:

1. Reading: “Tyranny of E-mail” – Risk to Project Comms?