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Urgent emails do not exist
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A lot of people laugh at us with a touch of disbelief when we bring up this topic. But if you care about your productivity and effectiveness, you might as well put a Post-IT with the same text on your monitor.
More and more are we starting to use email for all sorts of communication now that our inboxes are accessible anywhere and anytime from mobile devices. We are increasingly relying on email for more urgent communication, at great cost! If we accept that email can be used for urgent messages, we will have to be on top of our inbox continuously, scanning all the irrelevant emails with the same level of intensity as the more important ones.
As email volumes grow, we frequently find ourselves spending more time checking our email than doing our jobs!
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And then / but what now / are you sure / how to handle urgency
Thankfully, in most cases urgencies are not managed through email. If there is a fire, the alarm bells go off. If my child has hurt himself, the teacher will call me. And if she can’t get hold of me, at least a colleague can start taking action. The same thing should apply to work urgencies. If it is really urgent, someone will be bouncing up and down next to my desk or my phone keeps ringing until I answer.
- Using the Speedmailing tools, you will quickly establish an expectation with your contacts that you will attend to things in due time and that anything urgent is best addressed using other tools than email.
- Where you need others to urgently attend to things, pick up the phone, walk across the office or do what it takes to confirm that it will be adressed. That saves you from checking you inbox waiting for an answer.
- Really urgent messages should never be sent to an individual mailbox, at best to something like urgency@helpdesk.com with a whole team behind it taking care of urgencies.
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Wishing you an in-control inbox every day,
Email Handyman
PS: if you have an urgent reply to this message, please text or call me on +31 616 818 131. If not please let me know your thoughts or comments on richard@emailhandyman.com
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