The blog

For you who pre­fer lis­ten­ing to read­ing, this post is also avail­able as an episode of the ​“Done!” pod­cast:

Not just email anymore

The study was done in 2017. Since then, chat-based col­lab­o­ra­tive plat­forms such as Teams, Slack, and oth­ers like them have spread like wild­fire, mean­ing that we have all kinds of mes­sages in addi­tion to reg­u­lar emails to process and address on a dai­ly basis.

Some peo­ple I meet say that intro­duc­ing Teams has reduced the num­ber of inter­nal emails, but many still feel that they spend much more time than they would like on read­ing, writ­ing, respond­ing, email­ing, and chatting.

Many are impor­tant, but some are worthless

Many of the mes­sages and emails we get and inter­act with are absolute­ly nec­es­sary and valu­able to us in doing our job (you might even say that read­ing and respond­ing are tasks as well), but I am guess­ing you also receive quite a few things that just steal your time and focus for no good rea­son and with­out adding any real value.

Let us ensure you get few­er of these from now on.

Do this

Allow me to sug­gest you do the following:

1. Today, as you receive emails and oth­er mes­sages, keep an eye out for those you real­ly do not want to spend any time on. These mes­sages will be dis­tin­guish­able by them not adding any val­ue or help­ing you get your job done. Per­haps it is even unclear why you are receiv­ing them at all.
2. Do what you can today to pre­vent your­self from get­ting any more. You could, for instance,
   • Tell the sender that he or she need not spend their time send­ing your these emails from now on, but can use this time for more valu­able things instead.
   • Unsub­scribe if you nev­er read the con­tents any­ways and there is an eas­i­ly acces­si­ble link for doing so.
   • Leave groups in which you are no longer an active participant.
   • Remove chan­nels where mean­ing­less mes­sages appear and which you do not nec­es­sar­i­ly need to fol­low (if you have to ​“have” the chan­nel it seems to be a good idea to ask the oth­ers part of the same chan­nel to refrain from send­ing these kinds of messages).
   • Ignore con­ver­sa­tions that have gone off in some irrel­e­vant, oth­er direc­tion than the one they were orig­i­nal­ly going in and which you are no longer want to be a part of.
   • Opt-out of the dai­ly sta­tus-report email you oth­er­wise might receive from ser­vices that send out this sort of notification.
3. Now go on to enjoy the trimmed, pruned, more con­cen­trat­ed, and now more rel­e­vant, selec­tion of emails and mes­sages you will find in your inbox­es from now on. 

A tighter inflow

If you tight­en up your inflow of mes­sages and emails that are not of any great val­ue to you (any­more), you will have to spend less time than before on read­ing and answer­ing them. You will then have more ener­gy for oth­er tasks and the time you do spend on emails and mes­sages will con­tribute more to both your work and the busi­ness as a whole.

What’s your way?

How have you ensured that your inbox­es are filled with more rel­e­vant than irrel­e­vant mes­sages and emails? This def­i­nite­ly appears to be an accel­er­at­ing prob­lem in today’s com­plete­ly dig­i­tal­ized world. I am very curi­ous to hear what you have to share so feel free to email me.

(By the way, do you know how to mon­i­tor when some­one uses a cer­tain word in a chat mes­sage?)