- Jon -

Your thoughts / tips are incredibly helpful, for sure! And a clear sign that anyone can do it, if they would want to change their work habits and fragment a bit their interactions. Glad to know we are on the same boat! Many many thanks for adding further up into Dennis’ blog post. I will reference it in a follow up blog post some time soon!

Thanks!

I’ve been meaning to respond to your post for a couple of days, but I’ve been..bogged down in email. Thanks for airing this problem out!

Anyhow, I share some of these email aggravations, and there are definitely days where I feel like I am more in “reactionary mode” responding to email situations than I am pro-active, and the pro-active stuff is the forward-thinking things that make me feel like my days are worthwhile and not just a scramble. Those long email days are pretty deflating. The time that is hardest to claim is that pro-active writing/content/deliverables time, and for me, that’s the most important time of all.

I don’t have any easy solutions because a good chunk of my remaining email is pretty confidential one-to-one stuff that can’t be dealt with any other way. I do remind myself that email has helped to free me up from “manning the phones” all the time, so there are some benefits to the flexibility of email schedulewise, but after a point of volume, email really does turn on you.

One thing is that any emails I get on general SAP career questions, I tend to respond more briefly and point them to relevant links on my site. Or, I will create a longer email if it is a good new question, turn that into an article, and point folks there the next time around. So, creating content that serves as “FAQ” is always good to reduce general inquiries.

Another thing that has helped me is to realize that as important as it is to respond to client questions, I’m better off limiting my email sessions to a couple a day. So, after a certain point in my day I shut off my email. Twitter has helped me here as I let clients know they can find me all the time on Twitter if they need anything. The reason limiting the amount of email sessions is important is because many email correspondences are just longer conversations and the more email you send, the more you accelerate those conversations. Limiting the frequency of my own email sessions is helpful and folks know that while I will respond to email almost every day, they shouldn’t think of it as an instant ping. I do NOT for example route email to my cell phone and let folks think I’m responding to email that quickly.

I’m also always on the lookout for email threads that are better dealt with as phone conversations. Some topics are too complex or personal and are better off nipped in the bud in one phone call rather than turned into a inbox-busting email back and forth.

Another thing: aside from my mother, who will never get a handle on IM stuff, I have pretty much moved all personal correspondence off email and onto some kind of IM platform. I don’t use Twitter for that stuff as my Twitter account at jonerp is more “on topic” and I prefer the one-on-one interactivity of IM for close friends, I doubt my Twitter followers want to hear me prattling on about off topic subjects like what I think of Real Time with Bill Maher or if the New England Patriots can make the playoffs without Tom Brady – though I do share that kind of thing occasionally on my Twitter feed, it is pretty rare.

Finally, I tend to keep my email responses to the short side, to create more efficiency on an email-by-email basis. This long-winded comment, for example, is much longer than my typical email.

So, I don’t have a perfect solution and one-size-does-not-fit-all, but I will say that these things have helped.

- Jon Reed -

And a proof it can be done, too! heh

For example, I work with an advertising consulting, and we interact a lot around advertising creatives. I have her message me by commenting on the particular creative’s wiki page, and then I respond by comment as well.

The reason this works is that it pulls certain high-importance messages into a different medium. It also eliminates the sorting/archiving needs of email and stores the messages in context.

It’s not perfect; it’s not good for communications that aren’t about a specific wiki page/topic, and over time, you might have to delete some of the comments.