Toolkit for a Successful Manager

            Many institutions such as HBR, Forbes, and the NY Times, have reported on how to curb and control information overload caused by excessive emailing in organizations. As 28% of a manager’s time is spent on email (McKinsey), building a structure to prioritize and support e-mail processing can lead to greater productivity. Below are a few areas that should be considered to better manage emails:

• E-mail settings are an often-overlooked part of the system that can help improve productivity. From smart composition/ reply, signature, vacation responder, connecting multiple e-mail accounts into one place, frequent messages template to enhanced label/ folder/ categorization are all activities that can assist curb the email overload. Tweaking the settings can help facilitate one’s e-mail usage greatly. It could be as simple as setting a rule that directs emails from a team into a specific folder or directs newsletters and other interesting emails into a lower priority folder. Such practice can facilitate one’s ability to prioritize incoming emails and reduce digression. Here’s a quick guide from Microsoft Outlook and Google Gmail on how to set up rules in outlook and gmail.
• Email Add-ins are extensions that can be added into the e-mail provider of choice to help augment activities – naturally, these options depend on the security policies of your company and your IT department. It is important to speak to your IT or cybersecurity team prior to using these services since there may be concerns over Terms of Use, vulnerabilities, data policy and others.
  • Grammarly helps individuals write clear e-mails with limited to no grammar or spelling mistakes. There is a free and a premium version available for use.
  • Text lightning allows for a one-click text snippet, common phrases and salutations. This helps to cut out a few minutes from email processing, especially for high volume, repetitive email users.
  • Evernote & OneNote are two of the most used digital notebooks that now have integration capabilities with major e-mail providers, helping to facilitate, tagging, organization, sharing and much more.
  • Dropbox, Google Drive and MS OneDrive are the three major filesharing competitors with some add-ins capability available to most email providers.
  • JIRA and Trello are two of the main providers of visual project and task management with add-ins capabilities.
  • Zoom, Skype and WebEx are video conference providers that can be found in most organizations today.
  • Boomerang supports scheduling of email for a later time, follow-up on messages without reply and many more.
  • Microsoft Teams & Slack are at the forefront of the instant messaging platform market.
• Email Time Management is an under-appreciated ability of a productive manager. Savvy managers will often build a few rules to ensure that their time is optimized, below are some of the considered areas:
  • Schedule daily email time: Set-up a block of time, usually at the beginning and end of workday to tackle emails in the mailbox. A 30 to 60 minutes cycle is often enough to check for urgent emails.
  • 1-hour cycles: Build a habit of not checking emails constantly. There are cases where checking is necessary (emergencies), however, constantly checking emails can be very disruptive to the other tasks at hand.
  • Prioritize: One of the most powerful rules is to be able to prioritize. By building clear email label/ categorizations, it is possible to have a clearer picture of what needs to be read and responded to as soon as possible and what may be done later.
  • Quiet time: Set-up some time of the week where all communications systems are offline. This will allow you to spend time in areas that require focus. Encourage team/ department to follow similar rules to enhance their productivity.
  • 5 minutes, out: If an email requires less than 5 minutes to read and respond, it is often better to get it done with. Take into consideration all the other rules prior to following through with this one. (E.g. if there are 10 5minute emails, but none of them are high priority and 1 hour has been spent on email already, it may be better to leave the rest for later).
  • Block & Unsubscribe: The less email appears in one’s mailbox, the less reading and responding is necessary. Therefore, make sure to reconsider whether current subscriptions and email patterns remain relevant.