Do you ever come to the end of your day and wonder what you have accomplished? If so, it's likely you spent a lot of time responding to email. Now I love email, so don't expect one of those rants about how we would get so much more done if we didn't have to respond to email. When I was starting my career, the bulk of communications within an office was still done with paper memos. What do you think is faster, firing off an email message, or rolling a piece of paper into a typewriter, typing out the text, taking the paper to a copier, placing the copies into individual mailboxes, and then waiting for people to actually get back to you? Give me email any day.
Like all good things, email has good and bad qualities. We had much less spam back in the paper memo days. People had fewer expectations about getting an immediate response to a memo. ASAP meant hours or days, not seconds or minutes.
In this time of fast communications and even faster responses, it's important to build in time to think and to focus on what's important. The problem with email is that the important stuff comes interspersed with the unimportant. It is much easier to get distracted.
Peter Bregman wrote, "An 18-Minute Plan for Managing Your Day," in the Harvard Business Review Blog. Read his article to see how his plan works. Like most plans, though, it involves planning your day ahead of time, using defensive calendaring to set aside time for high-intensity work, and reviewing what you have done.
Don't let your tasks control you. Take control of your time and practice. You can get better at this.
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