Effective Time Management is essential to the success of any business owner or executive, as it relates to their ability to successfully manage and grow their organization.  For many email and the lack of an effective email management strategy can be their Achilles’ heel in the waste of many valuable hours each day leaving their e-mail open.  They end up stopping what ever they are doing in order to read and respond to every e-mail that hits their inbox. The flip side of this are those owners and executives who completely ignore their e-mail. They do not open or check their e-mail at all during the workday, thus leaving them with a completely full inbox and no real strategy to identify what is important and what is junk mail.

It was in a recent post by Chris Brogan (chrisbrogan.com) that prompted me to rethink my own e-mail management strategy and begin to track the impact that it had on my own overall time management. What I came to realize was that even though I maintained an e-mail component to my overall time management strategy each day and limited the time that I spent reading e-mails, I was not necessarily spending my time reading the right e-mails but more often the newest e-mails.

Email Management Strategy

E-mail can be a tremendous tool, but also a huge distraction that impacts our effectiveness to work on the business each day. Our goal should be to check e-mail just three times a day for no more than 30 minutes at a time and not have it on all day reacting to each ding that an email has arrived (turn that off).  We all know that there are times when you have to send or receive an important email, but that should be the exception and not the rule.  If you have to monitor your email during the day, then the only action you should take is to categorize mail in your inbox for later review at scheduled times.

The PEA Strategy

PEA stands for Personal Email Action Strategy, that you should develop and employ each day to effectively manage and control your email flow and what you spend your valuable time reading, reacting and responding to.   The reason I call it the PEA Strategy is that it is small in time required to effectively implement, but hard at first and requires a level of commitment to soften it up and make it part of your daily Time Management diet.

First simply setup three folders within your e-mail system below your inbox. Title each folder as follows:

• NOW Action – For emails that require immediate attention during your scheduled email management session.
• Action Required – Emails that require your attention, but are not an immediate priority.
• Education and Ideas – Emails, that should be read because they they bring value to you, your business, but should be read at a time set aside.

Plan your email sessions for early in the morning, mid-day and late afternoon before the end your day and set a maximum time of no more than 30 minutes (15-20 is better) to dedicate to email reading, reacting and responding.

Each e-mail session should follow these guidelines:

• PEA Overview – Quickly go through the e-mail in your inbox in an effort to sort the wheat from the chaff. This requires that you delete all unnecessary e-mails immediately, forward right then any e-mails that can be handled by others within your organization and last drop any other e-mails into one of the three folders that you have set up as directed above.

• NOW Emails – Go to your NOW folder first in order to read and respond if necessary to those e-mails that require your immediate attention.  Then either delete or move the email to an appropriate folder to have a back-up filed properly.  Make sure that any e-mails sent by you are moved from the sent folder into the appropriate folder pertaining to that issue if necessary also.  Managing where you store email correspondence is just as important as sending an email sometimes.

• Action Required – If you have not exceeded your 30 minutes (or whatever amount of time you allocate) then move on to e-mails that have been placed in the Action Required folder.  Use the flagging system most programs have to identify what should be handled first.  Remember, if someone else can be handling this then forward it immediately to the appropriate person and not waste your valuable time.

• Education and Ideas – We all receive emails that are not necessary, but important for education and ideas that can impact our lives and our business.  These emails or links to articles or blogs can be read during time set aside as part of your Time Management strategy for Strategic Planning, Education and Ideas.  Setting aside time each week to read, think, educate and stimulate ideas that will be the future of your business is both important and necessary.  Write these ideas down or create a spreadsheet.  It is not time wasted, you just have to plan the proper time.

One last important detail regarding e-mail is the subject line.  Make sure that every subject line pertains to the e-mail that you are sending and make it policy within your organization that the same guideline be followed by everyone. There is nothing worse than trying to find an e-mail that has been filed away with the subject line that has nothing to do with the topic or client it pertains to.

The PEA Strategy is about discipline, establishing priorities and making effective Email Management a strategic part of your overall Time Management Strategy.

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