Email Time Management

Drew made a really good point in his comment on my Monday post. He asked about what you do when emails and phone calls start to pile up, and your job description calls for a lot more than just responding to email. It's a good question - and the pressure only gets stronger when people figure out you're good at responding to emails and phone calls... they tend to call and write more frequently.

Honestly, there are a ton of things in ministry I'm not very good at. I'm still on the young side, and am developing in several areas, and I've felt the tension all week in my "advice giving" to make sure I don't come across as someone who thinks they're a better pastor than they are. That's certainly not the case with me. I wake up every morning with a fairly developed sense of my weaknesses and inabilities. But, this is something important that I do feel like I'm pretty good at.

For me, it comes down to having a strategy. And because I believe the principle of returning phone calls and emails is so important, I've made sure there is time in my schedule to do it. But that time in my schedule has a beginning and end. That helps me know what pace I need to be working. Yesterday afternoon, I had more than 100 emails I needed to read and respond to, and had blocked some time between 2 and 3 to do it. I've developed a strategy for rolling through those emails that helped me get through all of them easily in an hour.

1. Delete all the messages that have "FW:" in the subject line. As funny as those things are, I just don't have time for them. If you send me a joke or a funny picture, I'm not going to read it. Sorry. I'm willing to live with the seven years of bad luck by not sending them to my friends. It can be my own personal tribulation; I'm okay with that.

2. Respond to the Newest Emails First. This seems counter intuitive, but I do it for a reason. A lot of my emails are parts of conversations in which many people are using the "reply to all" feature. So, I may get 5 emails regarding the same subject. It's a waste of my time to follow the conversation along as it goes - give me the latest information and responses, and I'll follow the rest. I don't need to think through a response someone else has already come up with.

3. Respond to the Easiest Emails First. This also sounds counter intuitive. But there are several emails that can be responded to with a quick reply. If you come to an email that can't be responded to in less than a minute, skip it and come back to it after you've tackled the easier ones. You'll find that the vast majority of your emails can be answered with a quick sentence or two. It takes me about 15 seconds to say "The 28th will be fine for me. Hope things are going well. Thanks for handling this!" So, I answer those emails first.

4. Use your remaining time to tackle the most urgent emails. This takes the bulk of my time. Here I'm chasing down thoughts, people, or information. And I try to work on the most urgent emails first, and make my way through the rest of the list. If I run out of time, and I feel like people are expecting a response, I respond with a quick email telling someone "I got your message and need some time to think about it. I'll get back with you by ______ . Thanks."

In my opinion, the thing about email that sucks the life out of people is the stupid "ding" Outlook is defaulted to doing every time you get a new message. Turn it off. You'll be a lot more efficient when you work email into your schedule rather than allowing it to force you into its schedule. Time is like money. If you don't tell it where to go, it will disappear on its own.

I find when I'm strategic with my time, I have more time than I need. When I don't have a pretty well-defined plan for how I'm going to spend my time, it seems I never have enough.