How to Easily Manage Your Communications

Email, Teams, Slack and other instant messaging systems are great, until they clog up our day and we find we spend more time responding to messages than we do doing any meaningful work. What can we do? Well, that’s what I’m answering in this week’s episode. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get the Email Mastery Course Here The Hybrid Productivity Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 409 Hello, and welcome to episode 409 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. Last week was a workshop week for me. I finished off the Ultimate Productivity Workshop and held an in-company session. During both sessions, a similar question was raised. How to manage your time when you are compelled to respond to your messages instantly or at the very least within a few minutes. The problem with this situation is that it’s an uncontrollable one. You have no idea when or how many messages will come in on any given day. This makes it practically impossible to do any work. You will not be able to focus on anything if you have to be checking your messages inbox all the time. Now, I should caveat this: if you are employed to respond to client messages, then being responsive is part of your core work, and therefore it is something you would prioritise. However, in these situations, you’ll likely be working as part of a team, and most of your client queries will be handled in real time. Those that cannot be dealt with would be escalated to another person or department. The issue of response times arises when you are expected to do work that requires quiet, focused time to complete. In this situation, you will need to find time during the day to do that work. If not, all you will be doing is building unsustainable backlogs. To get to a place where you can complete your work and respond to messages in a timely manner, something will have to change. The first thing I would address here is response times. What is the expected response time for the work that you do? Is it realistic? Now, you have the data. You know how much time you need to do your work. Perhaps you need two hours a day to complete it. This means you have a degree of flexibility each day. In this situation, I would recommend you look at the times when most of your messages come in. For me, most of my messages come in through the night. I may go to bed around midnight with an empty inbox, but when I wake up, come through to the office and open my email, there will be between 100 and 150 emails sitting there waiting for me. The first step is to clear those emails and sort the ones I need to act on from the ones that can be deleted or archived. That gives me a heads-up for my day and calms my anxious mind, knowing there are no fires to deal with. Later in the day, I will set aside 40 to 60 minutes to clear the actionable emails. Now, I am fortunate in that when I wake up, Europe is asleep, the east coast of the US is going to bed, and the west coast is finishing the working day. In the morning, there is no rush for me to respond. If I were living in the UK, I would adjust my response time to better align with the time zones I work with. This is working with the data I have. But let me illustrate a different type of work and how to deal with it. Imagine you were responsible for writing proposals for your sales team. On a typical day, you would receive six to eight new proposals and four or five adjustments to make to proposals you have already done. If it takes you an average of twenty minutes to write a new proposal and ten minutes to make an adjustment, that will take up around four hours of your day just focused on writing proposals. That does not take into account having to request any further information you may need to complete a proposal. Now here’s where things get interesting. Not all proposals are equal. If you were asked to write proposals for a $10 million project and a $1,000 one, the $10 million project would likely take priority. I’m also pretty sure the person asking for the $10 million project proposal will be chasing you to get it done faster. If you already have a two-day turnaround on proposals, moving that project up would delay one of the other proposals. What do you do? The problem here is that while you are fielding messages from the people wanting their proposal done today, you are not writing proposals. Everything is getting delayed. Now, I’ve worked at companies with strict processes for these situations. Salespeople had to follow the ...