This is a rewrite of my original blog post from 2009, which I’ve managed to delete, without of course saving it.
This blog post became a presentation in 2009, which i also did in 2010 and 2011 and hope to do more in the future.
Due to the nature of my work, well at least up till October 2010, when I was still working for the biggest Slovenian online retail store – mimovrste, I’ve daily read between 300 and 400 emails. I’ve sent out no less then at least a 100 each day. 100 sent being pure minimal.
So looking at my job one day, I realized everyday communication became e-communication.
We have all these different types of e-communication abilities today: msn, gtalk, yahoo messenger, skype, aim, facebook, twitter, remember icq? And of course there’s email.
I’m 32, I still recall days when I was at first just a kid and we didn’t have mobile phones. Everyone had a stationary phone. Back then it was a big fuzz if you had a phone at home which didn’t have a spinning wheel to dial out, but buttons. Imagine that.
Few years later, teenager, I recall it was normal to have everybody’s home phone number, yes even the numbers of the girls.
These days it’s hard to get somebody’s phone number, lets not event mention the girls numbers.
So my day started looking more and more like: coffee, email, coffee, lunch, coffee, more coffee and e-mail.
Or, from time to time and different variation: coffee, email, meeting + coffee, email, meeting + lunch + coffee, more coffee and some more coffee and email.
At the end of the day, I’ve sent 257 emails – that is still my “record”. And that day I was 4 hours in the car in 1 meeting. No idea tho, how many emails I’ve read that day.
Time management
So it all comes down to time management. Is e-communication expected always and everywhere? With the popularity of smart phones and tablets you can be accessible anywhere at almost any given time.
Has it happened to you lately, that perhaps you went off grid for lets say 2-3 or 4 hours, because the reception was bad there and your phone didn’t get a signal. After those 2-3-4 hours you have enormous amounts of text messages and Facebook messages if you’re alright, did anything happen or even better are you still alive, you never reply this slow.
Expected?
So is e-communication expected? How often do you do the following or this happens to you? Somebody sends you an email and after 30 seconds calls you on the phone if you got the email?!?
And the sad thing is, we all do this. Including me. But we always know, the other person is not sitting at his desk waiting for my email or all the emails to drop in their inbox. Remember the days when you still had to sent a real paper letter thru the “snail” mail? It was justified calling the other person back then in the following days if he or she received your letter.
Demanded?
Is e-communication demanded? I’ve often seen or heard of the following: When John Doe started his new job he signed a form confirming that he received a: notebook, blackberry, another phone, USB internet stick, VPN access data, etc.. Do employers expect or even worse, demand from employees that they are constantly accessible? Is it fair, do they compensate for this demand financially?
Cost management
What about cost management? All this equipment costs something at the beginning, so we have the initial investment, but we have to add the cost of amortization, planning of depreciation of all the fixed assets.
How about cost of equipment management, IT personnel is a certain cost, even if you outsource it, laptops have 2-3 years of life expectancy, then it gets to slow or to sloppy. Phones get lost, break and fail and they have to be replaced with new ones or fixed. All screams costs! And don’t forget, software that runs on your laptops, etc., has to be upgraded, it costs too.
Coming down to
At the end it all comes down to a basic few questions:
what do you cost your company?
or
how much do your employees cost you?
So what does your employer pay for? To write and read emails?!?
Survival guide
So I came up with this survival guide, which helped me get thru the days, sometimes preventing me from strangling somebody or bitching at somebody.
It has 4 simple rules, which if you follow will make your email communication much easier and your life less of a struggle.
Rule #1 – Don’t look for emotions in email(s)
People love to do that. If somebody writes in CAPS, which usually means (in the old IRC slang) that the person is screaming, it’s not always like that. People all ages write emails and some simple don’t know this. Live with it. Take it into a consideration.
A lot of people like to show their power thru email, that they are superior or inferior. Most of the time, such people do this only because they avoid eye to eye or phone confrontations in some cases you’ll find out, rare tho, they don’t even write their own emails. And you’ll probably also hear their excuse: I can express so much better via email then in person.
Also how about punctuations and emotional response to it? Have you ever thought about, what if you miss a comma or a semicolon or a punctuation that you can easily offend somebody?
What if the person writing to you forgot to put a smiley face at the end of a sentence and you read this offensively.
So, if you see emotions in email(s) – stop already, there aren’t any. It’s plain, it doesn’t have emotions, it’s text, it’s data, it’s information. Look for emotions in a phone conversation or a live face to face conversation.
Rule #2 – Email is a tool to achieve goals / results
This actually isn’t mine to be honest. Gregor Cuzak told me this after we had a verbal fight and screamed a bit at each other, because I jumped him for the way he wrote emails to me. In the middle of all this screaming he told me this sentence: ” for me, email is a tool to achieve goals or results and that’s how I take it”. It got clear to me in a second.
So become more effective by being more goal or result orientated and read and also write(!) your emails in that matter.
Rule #3 – Email is not always the most effective way of communication
But you just said you can be more effective? True, I’ve said that, but email is not always the best way to communicate. Sometimes it’s quite the opposite, it slows down the processes, it makes you miss deadlines, it’s a big time waster.
With email invention we also got the RE’s, the CC’s and the BCC‘s as I call them. The great way to waste your time without even knowing it. 
Send an email out to 5 or 6 people at 3:50pm and seeing what happens regarding a quite important topic which can create a wast number of replies between lets say 2 or 3 people and then the other 2 or 3 start replying later that evening or even the next day and when the first 3 agreed already on something, person number 5 says they’ve made a mistake or i disagree and… well they just all waste time on something they could have simple cleared in 15 minutes via a phone conference call or a skype call or in person.
Rule #4 – The 4 hour rule of not replying to an email…
… which pissed you off.
Don’t reply to emails which piss you off immediately. I personally use a 4 hour rule, some people use 1 day, some use 2 days, some use a rule of 10 minutes, different. Start with 4 hours and see where it goes.
Why you ask? Simple. Your response, 4 hours later, won’t be emotional, you’ll cool down by then already and your answer will be more constructive, polite and most important, efficient!
Sometimes it’s hard, sometimes I would love to puncture somebody’s tires, strangle is canary, cripple his hamster, cross his guinea pig with an emu.
But after 4 hours, I just answer the email, his tires aren’t punctured, canary is still alive, hamster is still happily spinning it’s wheel, emu is still unsatisfied, guinea pig is still in one piece.
How?
People always ask me how to incorporate this 4 rules into their lives? Start with 1 or just 2, start with all 4 if you think you’re up to it. It’s hard to always be 100% at them. Even I fail. Sometimes I’m just too pissed, but most of the time it works for me and a few other people I know.
But most important, you have to self discipline yourself, give it time and even more time.
