As various cities and states introduce orders to work from home, more and more people are doing so for the first time. For those of you lucky enough to do so, there are some simple things you can do to maintain normalcy, reduce stress, and enjoy it, even if this continues for more and more weeks. I say “lucky enough to do so”, because there are plenty of people who don’t even have a job right now.
I’ve spent almost half my career as a consultant working from home or client’s spaces, and quickly learned that there are three key things that can make all the difference in how to maintain productivity and and how to “stop working” when my day was done:
Separate personal from work space
You now have that once-dreamed-of option to sit on the couch all comfy and work, don’t. That comfort doesn’t last very long once you are bent over, tapping away on a laptop on a coffee table. The body position is much worse than even the worst office furniture. There’s also a secondary effect that will creep in over multiple days: your work is now invading your curl-up-on-the-couch comfort spot.
Carving out a work space is key for this. If you have the option of a separate room with a table or desk, great. If you’re in a small NYC apartment, working from the dining table or some other table in a corner is a good option. For the duration, keep this space only for work. If it’s the dinner table, don’t eat there, except for “lunch at your desk”. If you use your laptop for personal and work now, move it to and from the work space when you are “at work” vs. “at home”.
Maintaining this separation of spaces helps you to keep focus during work and also put work away when you are done.
Keep a routine; keep a schedule
It may seem like a dream to work in your pajamas, and go for it for the novelty (for a couple of days), but this will come back to haunt you if it goes on for long. I keep seeing “For those who need to know, it’s Wednesday” social media posts, when it has maybe been a week of shutdowns. If people are losing track of days this quickly, it’s a sign of lost time due to loss of routine.
Keep your routines. Get up, shower, groom, and dress for work to walk into your “work space” on time and ready to work. Sure, you can now have “casual Mondays” as often as “casual Fridays”, but just dressing for work helps put you in the mindset to focus and work. Stepping into your “work space” on time and ready to go will help you also keep work from bleeding over into your personal space and time.
If you maintain a routine, you will find you can be far more productive in the work time than you may have ever been in the office with its constant interruptions. If so, feel free to have a full two hour lunch as part of the routine, where you leave your “work space”, have lunch, engage with friends on social media, exercise, or just watch movie. But when that time is done, go back to your work space ready for the afternoon.
If you do find your productivity is much higher than when you were in the office, save that for discussions with your employer about work-from-home options when we return to the office life after this current time.
Exercise
Most of the “stay-at-home” orders in cities and states do not prevent you from ever leaving your home. Being outside is important for health, so add outdoor activities to your routine. This is not a recommendation to go around spending a lot of time with people or touching everything. Maintain distance, avoid touching things you don’t absolutely need to, and wash your hands the moment you return. Also, regularly clean doorknobs, light switches, handles on cabinets, your laptop and phone, etc. since you will likely touch these before you have washed your hands at some point.
Overall, be cautious but try to maintain normalcy as much as possible. I wish you all the best and we will get through this together.
How many people can open their email right now and see more than 10 unread emails sitting in their inbox? 50? 100 or multiple hundreds?
For those happy with fewer than 50: How many have more than 10 emails in your inbox that have already been opened and read? 20… 50… 100… 1,000+? How many have an empty inbox with no unread emails? I do.
My current mailbox: Empty inbox with no unread emails except junk
Additional Questions:
How many people have sub-folders under your inbox? How many of those sub-folders have sub-folders? Multiple chains of sub-folders under sub-folders under sub-folders…
How many receive newsletters daily or weekly? How many of those newsletters do you actually read?
In Outlook, how many use the “Tasks” flags? Those who use these: how many have more than 10 tasks that are not completed? How many have 1 or more that is over a month past due? 6 months? A year?
Let’s look at your actual physical mailbox in comparison:
When you go to your physical mailbox, how often do you: open it, flip through the various pieces of mail, open a couple and peek inside at the bills or letters and then just shove everything back into the mailbox and walk away? You don’t; no one does. We do one of several things with the contents and leave that mailbox empty for the next day’s mail. Why would we treat our virtual mailbox any differently?
Leaving emails in your inbox in various states of reading, responses, sub-folders, and general chaos adds just another level of stress in the background. This background noise just adds more tension in your personal work space.
How to Deal With Your Inbox – the 4 Cs:
Complete it
Clean it
Calendar it
Cowork it
Let’s break these down:
Complete it: When you first read an email, does it involve a request for information or action that you can tackle in less than 15 min? Do it now, get it done, and archive the email removing it from your inbox as completed.
Clean it: Is it junk, spam, unnecessary info, or even useful info, but requires no follow up from you? Then read as much as you need and get rid of it.
Junk/Spam: mark it as such so it prevents future mail from this sender
Unnecessary info:glance through, but hard delete as you don’t need to keep it for any reason
Useful info, but no follow up needed: read and archive it, in case you want to refer back to it in the future
Calendar it: Will it take more than 15 min to follow up on a request for information or action? Put it on your calendar for a later date/time, so you can carve out an appropriate amount of time to deal with it. Inform stakeholders about the time that you will follow up. Setting these expectations is important. Most people are fine with a delayed response as long as you set an expectation on when you will deal with their request. You want to make sure that you can get a response or follow up back to them earlier than the expectation you set, so set the expectation on response later than the time you have set aside on the calendar for yourself.
Another key on this is to “put it on your calendar” rather than using the “task flags”. There are multiple reasons to do this, particularly to set aside a portion of your own time on a future time/date that won’t be overtaken by daily needs. It also blocks off the time on your calendar to prevent co-workers from picking that time for a meeting. Task flags have due dates, but don’t actually set aside the time on your calendar on a particular day to actually spend on the follow up.
Setting follow up time on your calendar is key to making sure you have time allocated and far more useful than “Task flags”
Cowork it: Will it take more than 15 min AND needs someone else’s input or actions? Put it on your calendar as a meeting with the person or people who need to be involved. If this doesn’t need to be an actual meeting, make a note in the meeting invite as “get this done or info back to me by this date/time, so we don’t need to meet.”
Still send a message back to the stakeholders letting them know when to expect a response. Make sure to include those delegated on that message, either CC’d and introduced, or BCC’d so they know what expectations you have set with the stakeholder. Communication and clear expectations always are key.
Avoiding the chaos of sub-folders:
For those of you with sub-folders, and sub-folders of other sub-folders: How much time do you spend on sorting and “filing” each email you receive under the right sub-folder? How many times have you come across something that would fit under multiple sub-folders and have to decide which one is the right one to file it under? How often do you actually go back and open up a single sub-folder to find an old email you filed away?
It often takes 5-10 seconds per email to “file” each away under the right sub-folder. Compare the time used on this to using advanced search tools to find an older email maybe once a week or once a month. That search time is usually less than 30 seconds. Basic math: 100 emails per day being filed away at 10 sec. each is 1,000 seconds per day, 5,000 sec. per week; that equals well over an hour a week wasted on just filing something away under the “right sub-folder” so that you can maybe save a few seconds once per week or month later finding it. This is a total waste of your time.
In past decades, email software had limited search features and putting things under sub-folders was key to being able to ever find them again without wasting a large amount of time in the search. But those are old systems from well over 20 years ago. Modern email platforms all have advanced search features with simple click+find searches on TO, FROM, SUBJECT, HAS ATTACHMENTS, etc. including full text searches of not only the messages, but even attachments.
Certain sub-folders DO have a use, but these are to help keep your inbox clean. For example, you can use automations to move newsletters directly out of you inbox and into a “Newsletters” sub-folder, since you can peruse that at your will, but it will keep the inbox clean and not bury important emails from customers/b2b underneath a pile of newsletters. The comparison with your real mailbox is that pile of New Yorker, Islands, or Food + Wine magazines you stack up as you get home with the intention of maybe reading them someday (though you probably just recycle them at the end of the month). You certainly don’t mix personal mail or bills into that mix; that’s how you end up missing something important.
Having a “Personal” sub-folder is also useful to separate out general work emails from those that involve information from HR, payroll, your insurance, or employee record like evaluations. These are emails that you will want to take with you when you leave the office and having an automation on this sub-folder to forward these to your personal email can help you prevent losing information on payroll or health benefits, etc. when you no longer work at that company.
Use Automations:
Most email platforms come with various automations and there are plenty of 3rd party plug-ins that can be added to every platform. Automations can help move, flag, and manage email flowing into your inbox to save you time and keep customer and b2b communications in the forefront. Some tools and plug-ins can tie into project management or customer service/marketing platforms for better management and relations on those platforms, but the simplest automations are just rules that help separate out things like daily or weekly informational newsletters from emails that require more immediate attention, like customer/b2b emails.
NSB Insights can help:
Please Contact Us for a free presentation version of this. We want to help you change your environment and culture, save time for everyone, and eliminate that “background noise” stress that comes from poor email management. We are happy to give up to a 1-hour presentation on this and other topics on managing communications, including a full Q&A and references to tools that can help you with automations.
A clean inbox is guaranteed to make you smile at least once the first time it happens. Good luck!
Before 10am, your inbox fills with at least 1 email per minute. Early morning meetings are dread because of the overflow of garbage emails you have to spend the next hour going through, even if the meeting you just walked out of was the rare” highly productive and motivational” type and you were inspired to jump onto those needed next steps.
By the time you’ve made it through your inbox, you’re frustrated and exhausted… and all but 1 or 2 of those pre-10am emails came from your co-workers. If this is your usual Monday, Tuesday, or everyday, you’re using email wrong as an organization.
Reasons why intra-office email is unproductive:
Inbox overload: your inbox fills with spam, customer/b2b messages, and with the addition of questions and requests by co-workers, ALL get diluted in the mix. You miss important customer/b2b requests, buried in all that other garbage, even if you have good spam filters.
Inbox fatigue: the sheer volume of emails drives you to put away email to only check it occasionally, delaying responses to everyone.
Poor threading: how many emails have been forwarded by your co-workers that are just a chain of RE: RE: RE: RE:, and now you have to scroll through repeated messages over and over to pick out any new bit of information to understand what is going on. This wastes 3-5 times the amount of your time.
CC spam: every input or reply to a chain where you are on CC is just more emails in your inbox when your input is not needed.
Accidental horror-show: when an internal communication accidentally gets shared with external customers/b2b because they were buried in the TO or CC lines and you or your co-worker didn’t realize this. This can be legally dangerous, or at least embarrassing.
Solution:
For intra-office communication, get a collaboration/work chat tool and establish a clear-cut policy that there need to be 2 separate channels for communication:
Internal communication should exist solely on this collaboration/work chat platform
Email should be used only for communication involving customers/b2b
Having email used only for communication involved with external customers/b2b makes sure that everyone know that customers/b2b are involved, preventing the “accidental horror-show”. It also makes email have a new priority in communication, eliminating Inbox overload and Inbox fatigue.
Internal collaboration/work chat comes with Status identifiers that allows your co-workers to know when you are available for immediate response and when you are not. These tools also have much better threading, and help eliminate or minimize CC spam, by allowing back and forth communications to be single-thread only and with alerts for when your attention or input is directly needed.
Most offices are employing some kind of Project Management platform for larger projects and productivity. This is good for those specific projects, but not for general intra-office communications.
Solid internal communication platform with threaded discussions, file sharing, etc. and has a “tasks” feature for managing requests and follow up without a full project management component
Flowdock ties directly into email and can help separate internal chat communications from customer/b2b emails and route those into various project management platforms
This tool combines chat, file sharing, and tasks with light project management. If your office is using other Atlassian products, like Jira for project management, this is the better tool for you
If your office is a “Google Workplace”, this is the tool for you as it integrates with Gmail and Google Drive
*please note: the tools listed above and descriptions are only an opinion and recommendation to evaluate. This list does not imply any specific preference and NSB Insights has no partnership with any of these companies.
If your business is interested in help with finding the right solution for you, please Contact Us. We are happy to act as your “buyer’s agent” and will help find/integrate the solution you need.
