Email. Our lives wouldn’t be the same without it. It is a tool that has revolutionized the workplace, improved communication, and allowed employees to accomplish more in less time. However, if mismanaged, it can have a devastating affect on productivity and profits.

Have you ever stopped to think of what your organization’s email culture is? How do your employees use email? How do they manage it? How do they send it? How do they save it? The habits they adopt, whether they are positive or negative, can be contagious and suddenly your business has it’s own email culture.

Here is just one example of how an email culture can evolve. A boss realizes that he needs to call an urgent meeting with 3 of his managers. He sends an email needing a response in the next 15 minutes. Two of the three see the email and respond. The third, who was working on an important project, did not have his email on, missed the request, and angered his boss.

Number three has just now learned that he can never turn his email off for fear of missing an important email. But it doesn’t stop here. It rolls downhill. The three managers have now been given "permission" to use email as an URGENT delivery system. They use it in their departments, and very quickly, the entire organization is infected with this virus. No one can turn off his or her email for fear of missing something vital. Employees become slaves to the "brinnng" and stop productive work anytime an email comes in, even if it’s just spam.

And that’s just one example. Think of the practices of copying everyone under the sun, just so you don’t miss someone. Or how about using email as a chat room with multiple recipients to resolve dilemmas? Or how about using email to critique someone’s performance? One person does it, others do it. Culture is changed.

Email can also be extremely costly if not used effectively. When you consider the average recovery time from any interruption is about 4 minutes, you can imagine the cost to your organization when people look up every time an email is received. Do the math. If you stop what you’re doing every time you receive an email and get 30 emails in one day, that equals 120 minutes of recovery time—two hours of waste! And that doesn’t include the time spent handing the email. Now multiply that by every employee, everyday, and you can see how profitability can seriously begin to drop.

In order to instantly combat this loss, give everyone in your organization "permission" to turn off auto-receive, and instead schedule email deliveries every 90 to 120 minutes. This can shorten recovery time to about 30 minutes – a saving of 90 minutes added right back to your bottom line.

Here are a few other tips to help you create a positive office email culture excerpted from my new eBook, Reclaim Your Workplace Email Productivity: Add BIG BUCKS to Your Bottom Line:

1. NEVER use email as an urgent delivery system. If there is an urgent matter, pick up the phone or walk down the hall.
    
2. Move everything OUT OF your inbox. Your inbox should not be a holding tank and your employees can manage their time better by putting emails appropriate folders so that no important information is ever lost or hard to find.
    
3. Make Subject Lines VERY specific. By including details in subject lines, you will help others sort and prioritize their work. Instead of having a subject read, "Wednesday Meeting," have it read "Please bring the attached handout to the Wednesday 2:00 Staff Meeting."
    
4. Copy only the people who REALLY need to receive the email. Each "extra/nice to copy" person you add will have to open and read the email, adding unnecessary tasks to their already full days. Multiply this times the number of unnecessary copies, and the productivity drain adds up.

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Email Noodling?!!! Watzzat? Chances are, you know exactly what it is, although you may not recognize the name… We call it E-Noodling, for short.

Email Noodling is the pervasive and time wasting practice of looking at all the subjects in your inbox, scrolling up and down, opening one every here and there, closing them without working on them, marking them unread" to make sure you read them again, scrolling up and down some more, lamenting about all the work you have to do, then getting up and going for a cup of coffee.

We’ve all done it. Most of us still do it. It is a habit that has evolved with the growing use of email.

It costs organizations and you a ton… in lost or misused productivity, and perhaps even stress.

Prior to the advent of email, our work and projects were delivered to us by mail or by voice. We received US Postal mail once a day, and company delivered mail only a few times daily. And it wasn’t that much. Our bosses and colleagues may have also delivered to do’s for the task list by phone, personally or in meetings. Most of us remember the day when we actually planned our work, and felt good about the numerous things we accomplished each day.

Enter email. In addition to all of the sources listed above, the free convenient email delivery system has just added a minimum of 30-50 more tasks to the average worker each day. Even though there may be some spam in there, it is still a task.

The clincher is, because there is so much email, and the inbox is right there staring you in the face, most people leave a majority of the delivered messages in their inbox. So even if you clear out 20 of those 30 emails daily, over ten days, you can have 100 items hanging in that inbox. Yikes.

Then what do you do with all those items?!! You "e-noodle."

You search and sort, answer a few, file a few, delete a few. You re-sort, hoping you’ll be able to delete 10 at once. You look at all those items, get exasperated, and get up and take a walk!

The challenge with e-noodling is that most people confuse activity with results. They are drawn to knocking off items, rather than working on the most important priority. Give me just 10 minutes, and I’ll clear out 30 pieces of mail. Soon that 10 minutes grows, and you get entangled in the task related to one of the items, while you were just trying to clear it out, and oops, you’ve just started working on a not so important item. Confusing activity with results.

Occasional e-noodling is ok. We all do it. Sometimes we need those mindless times of the day to stare into space or e-noodle.

The biggest challenge about e-noodling is that people are engraining e-noodling as a habit. It has become the way they handle their email, and has become a big part of how they manage (or should we say mis-manage?) their time and their work.

It is reactive, and, done habitually, it can become extremely unproductive and stressful. The cost is not only in the time spent e-noodling, but in the resultant time spent working on the items that are no where near the top of your priority list, and ultimately the stress related to not getting the "right" stuff done.

The cure? Empty out that inbox. Move those emails to another holding place that allows YOU to decide the priority rather than getting romanced into working on the wrong stuff. Avoid skimming subject lines in hopes of clearing out a few items. Work your email from the top down, consistently. Stop surfing. Focus.

And to get there, you’ll need to e-noodle one more LONG time. E-noodle until every item - every item--is out of the inbox. Then keep that inbox clean. And start managing and enjoying your e-noodle-less life again.

While it sounds simple, changing your habits to make sure you do this every time you review your mail can be a challenge. This and several other strategies you can take to get your email under control can be found in our eBook: Help! I’ve Fallen into my Inbox and Can’t Climb Out!

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