How much time does it take for you to wade through email every day? Through this ebook, I hope to give you ideas on how to reduce the amount of time spent in your Inbox. Additionally, it would be nice to reduce some of the volume of email. Lastly, I’d like to help you and your team use email to communicate more effectively. Hopefully these are your goals as well.

After you’ve read this ebook, don’t just keep these pointers to yourself! These tips will work best when agreed upon and shared with other people. With that in mind, not everything is going to work for you. However, hopefully you will find some things that will make you think, “This will really help our email productivity,” depending on the culture at your organization and within your department or team. Others, you may realize, wouldn’t work as well for you. My objective is just to throw as many ideas as possible at you.

Should We Use Email?

The first thing to consider is whether or not email is the best way to communicate in the first place. I’m sure you’ve had situations with multiple email exchanges where you’ve thought, “Why didn’t we just pick up the phone? This could have been resolved if we just had talked.” Step back a minute and consider whether the medium you’re using actually matches the message.

Let’s discuss a model to consider what type of communication would be most effective: Channels of Communication: