7 Tips for Successful E-mail Management

Do you receive dozens to hundreds of emails each day? Does it seem that a disproportionate amount of your professional time is spent reading and replying to messages? Have you ever sent a heated or sloppy email you wish you could take back? The following are seven email management tips that can help you save time, raise productivity, and enhance your brand. Not all of these suggestions may apply to your particular situation. Simply take what ideas you can use and leave the rest.

1. Establish a regular block of time each day to answer emails.
One of the most time consuming and productivity draining tasks at work is answering individual emails as they come in throughout the day. Generally speaking, unless your job is email driven, the amount of time spent on emails should not exceed, at the very most, twenty-five percent of your workday. Establish a regular regiment of answering emails only during a specific period each day. This is separate from the important emails you initiate, which can be written at any time. There may be an occasional exception, such as when you have an important email from your boss or customer. For the most part, however, stick with the time frame so you can be more efficient with your work.

2. Prioritize your emails and answer only the most important.
During your designated email time, prioritize the incoming emails as either “A: must answer,” “B: should answer,” or “C: could answer.” Focus on answering all the “A”s and some of the “B”s. Skip the “C”s. One of the most important rules of time management is to separate the important from the urgent. By prioritizing your emails and answering only the most important messages, you can dramatically increase your productivity.

For more on career success and strengthening your job performance, download free excerpts of my publications (click on titles): "Branding Your Career Like Steve Jobs — Seven Essential Lessons in Work Success," "Confident Communication for Female Professionals," and "Successful Office Networking

3. Answer your emails not individually, but in batches.
If you receive multiple emails from a co-worker or team each day, answer with just one reply. The one message outlines your replies to all recent correspondence. Once you begin this practice, don’t be surprised if some of your colleagues follow your example, leading to overall reduced email traffic.
4. Let your colleagues know you only answer emails during a certain time of day.
This tip may or may not be appropriate in your particular situation, but it's worth considering. With colleagues who expect instant email replies on a regular basis, let them know that you have a set-schedule for answering messages. Some co-workers like to send streams of short emails and expect you to answer each one right back as if you’re conversing or texting. Others may email you with detailed requests and expect you to respond right away. Both behaviors show a disregard of your time. There’s a time management saying: “Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.” You’re in charge of your time. Stick to your email schedule and teach your colleagues to respect it.
5. Save and review your most important messages before clicking “send.”
Our writing is an important aspect of our professional brand. Messages that contain multiple spelling, grammar, and other writing mistakes can create the perception that the author is careless, impulsive, or simply a poor writer — not the impressions you want to create if you desire professional respect and advancement. Before sending out an important email, save it, do something else for a few minutes, then come back and proof read. You may be surprised and relieved at the mistakes you find.

6. Treat each work related email as potential public information.
The messages you send and receive via company email are the property of your employer. They can be surveilled, flagged, and in some cases used as evidence to support punitive measures or legal action. A joint survey of the American Management Association and The ePolicy Institute found that two out of three companies monitor web use. In addition, your colleagues may show or forward your “confidential” emails to others without your permission.

Avoid writing messages on your company email that are angry in tone, attacking in words, gossipy in nature, or offensive in humor. Most importantly, avoid leaking confidential or sensitive company information to those who are not authorized to know. If you think an email you’re about to send could potentially get you into trouble, it may be wise to click “delete” instead. The same applies to your instant messages and social networking activity via company property.
For more on how to deal with difficult colleagues and managers, download free excerpts of my publications (click on titles): "How to Communicate Effectively and Handle Difficult People," "How to Successfully Handle Passive-Aggressive People," and "Communication Success with Four Personality Types."

7. Consider a branding statement as part of your email signature.

In the signature portion of each work email you send, it’s smart branding to include a short statement which represents your professional vision or values. They individualize who you are to the recipient, and serve as a reminder of your product or service. Some professionals include a personalized logo as well. Here are two examples:

Molly Prichard, The Growth and Adventure Company
"Learning never exhausts the mind." – Leonardo da Vinci
Marie Louise Diaz, Author and Blogger

Sharing stories of ordinary women with extraordinary courage.

In conclusion, if you’re inundated with work emails, you can either control them, or let them control you. The astute professional manages emails wisely, and as a result increases both the quality and quantity job performance. It’s one aspect of leadership success.

Six Strategies to Secure Your Job and Advance

“Job security is gone. The driving force of a career must come from the individual.”
– Homa Bahrami

"Regardless of age, regardless of position, regardless of the business we happen to be in, all of us need to understand the importance of branding. We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You."
– Tom Peters

Since the onset of the current economic downtown I’ve spoken with many professionals on how they’re enhancing the survivability of their jobs, and in many cases even managing to excel and move up. The following are six job protection and advancement strategies, coupled with real life examples.

1. Take on long term, strategic endeavors.
An administrative professional took courses in negotiation and mediation, and became part of the negotiation team representing human resource interests of all administrative staff in the organization. His unique, strategic position meant that he was an unlikely candidate for layoff.
“Even individuals need to develop a brand for themselves .... Whatever your area of expertise, you can take steps to make people think of YOU when they think of your field.”
– Accelepoint Webzine

2. Participate in revenue generating tasks.
For the past few years the operations director of an organization increased the scope of her responsibility from building security and maintenance to marketing and renting out the facility for conferences and special events. Her revenue generating capacity, plus the personal relationship she established with many regular clients, made her position more secure.
“In a competitive world, organizations are realizing that only people can
brand products or services effectively – that we are not just selling a
branded product but a mass of branded people who support and deliver it.”
– Helena Rubinstein

3. Oversee projects that make you indispensable.
When the assistant manager of a large, non-profit organization was offered the task of upgrading the computer network for the entire firm, he took it on with gusto. Not only was he eager to bring new technology into the organization, he was also well aware of the fact that, as the only employee who knows how to make the computer network run without a hitch, the task made his position in the firm indispensable.
“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”
– Thomas Edison
For more on career success and strengthening your job performance, download free excerpts of my publications (click on titles): "Branding Your Career Like Steve Jobs — Seven Essential Lessons in Work Success," "Confident Communication for Female Professionals," and "Successful Office Networking."

4. Incorporate multiple positions and responsibilities to reduce employer cost.
When a data processing firm implemented a hiring freeze with possible layoffs on the horizon, an office manager took on an additional position left vacant by the freeze. By clearly demonstrating to her employer that she’s boosting productivity while saving the company money, she increased her value and the likelihood that she’ll be protected from layoffs.
“Things work out best for those who make the best of how things work out.” 
– John Wooden

5. Acquire specializations that make you indispensable.
A high tech professional working for a global media outlet took an advanced certification course which qualified him as one of only two hundred and fifty people in the U.S. with that skill set. This specialization, plus his ability to effectively communicate with clients and managers, helped him keep his job through merger and consolidation.
“If you can, be first. If you can't be first, create a new category in which you can be first.”
– Al Ries & Jack Trout

6. Develop cross-occupational niche.
Example #1: A production worker saw the writing on the wall that his facility was going to shut down and all the jobs outsourced. With great foresight, he took foreign language classes to enhance his qualifications. When layoffs came, he not only survived, but received a promotion to manage from the U.S. the team overseas.
Example #2: Many realtors, in the absence of large number of home sales, are taking courses to branch into areas such as foreclosures and property management.
"Branding demands commitment; commitment to continual re-invention."
– Richard Branson
“Everybody wants to be a winner, but only a few are willing to spend the time and energy to become one, and that separates a winner from all the rest.”
– Br. Philip Keavny

How to Be Ultra Productive — 10 Tips for Mastering Your Time

"Time is what we want most, but what we use worst." – William Penn

"Time is really the only capital that any human being has, and the only thing he can’t afford to lose." – Thomas Edison

"It’s how we spend our time here and now, that really matters. If you are fed up with the way you have come to interact with time, change it." – Marcia Wieder

Do you ever wish you had more time to do everything? Have you had days that were busy but inefficient? Would you like to be highly productive, feel accomplished at the end of each day, with even time to spare?

The following are ten tips to help master your time, interspersed with thoughtful quotes, many of which from well-known, successful individuals who have (obviously) made good use of their time.
1. Do not confuse busyness with productivity. Highly productive people are often less busy than those who are overworked and overwhelmed.

"It’s not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is, what are we busy about?" – Henry David Thoreau

2. Do not confuse the urgent with the important. Last-minute distractions from yourself and especially others are not necessarily priorities.

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life." – Steve Jobs
"If you want to make good use of your time, you’ve got to know what’s most important and then give it all you’ve got." – Lee Iacocca

3. The key to time management is self-management.

"The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot." – Michael Altshuler

4. Remember the 80/20 rule of time management, which tells us that 80 percent of the importance of what we do in any given day lies in only twenty percent of the activities. Therefore, if you focus on accomplishing the top twenty percent of the most important tasks, you will feel more productive and satisfied at the end of the day.

"One man gets only a week’s value out of a year while another man gets a full year’s value out of a week." – Charles Richards

“I get paid not by how many hours I work, but by the importance of the problems I solve.” – Anonymous

5. Use a good day planner. The best ones give you at least one full page (or screen) per day, with space allocated for each working hour of the day.
"I must govern the clock, not be governed by it." – Golda Meir
For more on career success and strengthening your job performance, download free excerpts of my publications (click on titles): "Branding Your Career Like Steve Jobs — Seven Essential Lessons in Work Success," "Confident Communication for Female Professionals," and "Successful Office Networking."

6. Separate obligatory time from discretionary time. In your day planner, block out all the times when you’re committed to others to be at a certain place at a certain time, such as meetings, conferences and other appointments. What’s not your obligatory time is your discretionary time. This is the time you can manage.
"Realize that now, in this moment of time, you are creating. You are creating your next moment. That is what’s real." – Sara Paddison

7. List: At the beginning of each day, write down a bullet-point list of everything you would like to accomplish this day.
"Make use of time, let not advantage slip." – William Shakespeare
"This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it." – Ralph Waldo Emerson

8. Prioritize: Next to each bullet-point item, assign an “A” if this is a “must do” item for today, a “B” for “should do” and a “C” for “could do.” For large projects, break it down into small parts and prioritize. Divide-and-conquer.
“For every minute spent organizing, an hour is earned.” – Benjamin Franklin
"The key is in not spending time, but in investing it." – Stephen R. Covey

9. Implement: Focus on accomplishing your “A” list with your discretionary time. Check off each item as it's complete. With this system, even if you only accomplish twenty percent of your entire list for the day, you still would have accomplished eighty percent of the most important work.
"Until we can manage time, we can manage nothing else." – Peter F. Drucker

10. What you don’t finish today, transfer to your list for tomorrow and reprioritize.
In conclusion, when we manage our time wisely, we can be at our productive best, so we can enjoy life more and rest!
"Time equals life; therefore, waste your time and waste of your life, or master your time and master your life."

Do What is Important, Not What is Urgent

We all feel under pressure to reply to emails, tweets, texts and sacrifice what is really important. There will always be emails in the inbox. Carrying out chores will never create ground breaking and remarkable work.

Successful creative people put their work first, not last. They start the day with their real work. That’s when they feel energized and industrious. You owe it to yourself to make your creative development the top priority.

Mozart always put his music first. He would compose anywhere—at meals, talking to friends, playing pool and most famously while his wife was giving birth in the next room. Although he died young, he wrote huge amounts of music. It would take over 8 days to play all of his music, one piece after the next, without stopping. Mozart put creativity first. Great people treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.

The great French product designer Philippe Stark believes that if you have an idea you should transform it into a finished work as soon as possible. You get a shot of energy and excitement from an idea and you have to use that power. If you put work aside for a while and come back to it—you lose that exhilaration and start to question what you’re doing. You begin to think more logically - doubt sets in and the energy level drops. If you have an idea you have to bring it to completion quickly. You have to ignore everything and concentrate on your creative task.


Do not spend the best part of the day, when you are fresh, completing chores. When you turn to your serious work, your energy will have dropped and it’ll be harder to focus. Goethe said ‘Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.
’
It takes time to create something remarkable—a novel, a design, a software application or a revolutionary new company. It will never seem as urgent as the pestering electronic media we are swamped with. The thing that is most important is often the most quiet.

The Secret of Success in Life

It is not immediately obvious what it means to be successful in life. The term is used generally to describe a professional success, that is, a signal achievement at work, indicated in part, but only in part, by having made a lot of money. Sometimes success means preeminence in politics or science or sports in a manner that does not necessarily imply financial attainment, but rather public recognition. Those who become famous in the arts or by virtue of charitable acts or acts of bravery are thought to be successful also. Others speak perhaps less conventionally of successfully raising children and grandchildren. That is not what most people mean by success, but a good case can be made for that achievement being especially important; and different societies have regarded the work of bringing up the next generation as critically important.

Let me say what I mean by success: success is the ability of individuals to reach their own goals and achieve their own purposes. I do not mean goals such as becoming a movie star, or winning the Nobel Prize in literature or becoming the President of the United States. Or simply making more money than everybody else. By that standard virtually no one is successful. But I think it is possible for these individuals and others to find in other ways those satisfactions that are associated with those lofty achievements, namely, recognition, admiration and a sense of importance.

However, I recognize that certain particular accomplishments tend to mean success to most people. These are: finding a job and a career that has status in our society and that brings with it enough financial reward that it is possible to live comfortably. This is the familiar picture of a house with a picket fence. The particular kind of work they will engage in will otherwise vary widely. Part of this success—in the eyes of most people—is a loving family, usually including children--and good friends. And having a place in the community.

Plainly, there are a number of factors that influence someone’s future success, starting with choosing the right parents in the right country. The children of affluent, educated parents are more likely themselves to be well-educated and ultimately employed successfully in good jobs. I take this to be an outgrowth of plain good luck. And good luck enters into people’s lives over and over again in many ways. Most truly distinguished individuals acknowledge the influence of luck in their lives.
The children of the “right parents” are likely to move in the right circles. If they attend the right college, they are likely to meet and marry individuals who are, themselves, successful. Every lucky step along the way gives more opportunities.

Also, for reasons that I do not need to belabor, it is advantageous for an individual to be especially bright, unusually attractive, talented, and, even tall and strong. None of these qualities guarantees success, but they all help. But put together they will not add up to very much unless certain other qualities of mind and personality are present. In other words, having all these advantages will not prevent some people from botching up; and we all know someone like that.

There is one overriding quality of mind and personality that weighs more strongly than anything else in determining eventual success. It is character. Eventual success depends more than anything else on the ability to keep striving in the face of disappointment and rejection. And failure.

I have been struck over the years by how many people fail despite growing up with all the advantages of money and good health; and by how many others there are who start off impaired and impeded by emotional and physical illness and being born into dysfunctional and abusive families, and still manage to succeed. Included in those success stories is a man who could not attend school growing up because of a phobia which then prevented him from leaving his neighborhood, but who ended up owning three or four food franchises. He had previously failed in one business after another. Another man with a similar story ended up going to medical school at a somewhat advanced age and became a pediatrician.

I remember another man who had spent three entire years in a mental hospital when he was young and who kept losing jobs subsequently, but who persisted in looking for work until he found a stable job as a mechanic. He married a woman who loved him, and they had two children.

 I remember a woman with a learning disability who kept talking her way into jobs that she then failed at until she finally rose to prominence in a cosmetics company. Every successful author has gone through a prolonged period of rejection after rejection. Many of the greatest Presidents have failed at previous endeavors or been defeated in previous campaigns. These include Grant, Lincoln and even Washington.

I remember a very troubled young man who managed on his first date to lock himself outside a building on a fire escape. He had one romantic misadventure after another until he finally learned how to approach a woman. After five years of treatment he married.

There was a middle-aged lady who did not think much of herself but who joined a church and by virtue of helping everyone became admired and then beloved by everyone.

I find myself admiring these people who seem to surmount insurmountable difficulties simply by not giving up. They suffer embarrassment and sometimes humiliation, and yet they do not give up. Sometimes I see a child in school who is like that, and I know—and I tell the child’s parents-- that that child will turn out okay. I know that child will catch up, because it is the single virtue of persistence that makes for success.

How to Avoid 7 Common Mistakes on the Road to Success

When you're smarter about how you set goals, you're more likely to succeed. 

 

“One way to keep momentum going is to have constantly greater goals.”—Michael Korda
Everybody and their grandmother (and probably your grandmother) will tell you that setting goals is the key to success. I was taught goal-setting at an early age and I’ve taught goal-setting and goal-getting for many years, to thousands of students.

And for the most part, my students get really stoked as they work with goals and see the amazing results they can create. But every once in a while, a student approaches me and says that they hate goals, and that goals just make their lives miserable and stressful!

How could setting a goal and pursuing something you desire make you feel lousy? I’d never had that experience so I checked some books and articles to try to figure it out. I cam to realize that there are certain goal-setting, goal-getting errors that can make the process backfire on you.
Here are seven:
 

1. Your goals aren’t aligned with who you really are. As Brain Tracy says, “Just as your car runs more smoothly and requires less energy to go faster and farther when the wheels are in perfect alignment, you perform better when your thoughts, feelings, emotions, goals, and values are in balance.” Do your goals really reflect what’s important to you? Are they the things you think you should want but don’t actually want? Pursuing a goal that isn’t who you are is like wearing shoes two sizes too big or too small—you’ll be miserable. Find goals that fit who you really are, and who you are becoming.

2. You’re pursuing someone else’s goals. You look around and see what a great relationship a friend has or the amazing new career your cousin has. You may see others winning awards or getting paid bundles of money. So you set your sights on what they’ve got. But as Marcus Buckingham says, “We can never achieve goals that envy sets for us. Looking at your friends and wishing you had what they had is a waste of precious energy. Because we are all unique, what makes another happy may do the opposite for you. That's why advice is nice but often disappointing when heeded.” You aren’t here to live someone else’s life, no matter how good it looks from the outside. Only your own internal voice can tell you what will really bring you joy and fulfillment.

3. You want something different but you’re not willing to be different. Change is an inherent part of goal-getting. When you set a worthy goal, it automatically stretches you and makes you confront some of your limiting beliefs and decisions. It forces you to become the kind of person who has or does whatever your goal is. As Les Brown said, “You cannot expect to achieve new goals or move beyond your present circumstances unless you change.” If you’re determined to remain the same old you, expect to achieve the same old results.

4. You don’t appreciate the present. If your happiness is always “out there” somewhere, you’ll never be happy. Waiting to be happy until you reach your goals is a sucker’s game—because there’s always a new goal just out of reach. It’s okay to be a bit discontented with where you are. But you’ll make yourself miserable if you don’t look around and feel grateful for your life as it is now. As long as your heart is beating and you can take a breath, as long as you can experience a new sunrise, you have plenty to appreciate. As Bo Bennett says, “Success is about enjoying what you have and where you are, while pursuing achievable goals.”

5. You don’t really believe you can achieve your goal. Are you trying to do something you believe is impossible for you to achieve? That's like shackling a 200-pound weight to your ankles before a race. It doesn’t matter how brilliantly you design your goals or how tenaciously you pursue them. If you don’t really believe you can reach them, you’ll be fighting yourself the whole way. As Ralph Marston says, “Your goals, minus your doubts, equal your reality.” You’ll certainly create misery for yourself if you insist on dragging your doubts along with you as you work toward your goals.
And here’s the thing about “impossible": You can never prove it. Think about it: We can prove that something can be done. We know that we can break the 4-minute mile and walk on the moon—both things once considered impossible. But there’s no way to prove that you can’t do or achieve something. Even if a million people try and don’t succeed, the 1,000,001st person might. So why believe in impossible at all?

6. You’re trying to get there too fast. People often say that life is a journey—but I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anyone describe life as a sprint! Goals can propel us forward. But natural momentum is not the same as a frantic chase. Andrew Bernstein writes, “We need to distinguish between stress and stimulation. Having deadlines, setting goals, and pushing yourself to perform at capacity are stimulating. Stress is when you're anxious, upset, or frustrated, which dramatically reduces your ability to perform.”
 
7. You haven’t built in smaller wins along the way. Some people have goals that are huge: Eradicate world hunger. Create peace in the Middle East. Marry George Clooney (wait, that one’s been taken). I would never discourage anyone from having big goals. But we all need to make sure we have steps along the way so that we can feel progress. You won’t eradicate hunger all at once. But you can come up with a good project to feed the homeless in your community. You can inspire conferences and brain trusts to develop new approaches. Give yourself bite-size pieces of your large goals. As John Johnson said, “If you make them too big, you get overwhelmed and you don't do anything. If you make small goals and accomplish them, it gives you the confidence to go on to higher goals.”

Setting goals and pursuing them should make you feel inspired, not tired; enthusiastic, not discouraged; and confident, not insecure. I’ll end with a favorite reminder about goals: “When we are motivated by goals that have deep meaning, by dreams that need completion, by pure love that needs expressing, then we truly live.”—Greg Anderson