Time to dive into the (new) action points I undertook to combat my stress levels.
- drop, act or plan mails
This is the same as I did before. I scan a mail to see if it’s only informative (drop), if I can give a very quick answer (act) or if it would take longer than 5 minutes to process it.
In the latter case, I plan a meeting in my agenda to block time to process it. Of course, a reference to the mail is an attachment to this meeting so I don’t have to hunt for it anymore.
This helps a lot to keep the magic ‘0 mails unread’ words on the screen.
This is a technique I adapted from a Getting Things Done course at work. - time-limit mail time
I plan one block of 1,5 hours each morning to process the mails. If I ever have some extra time, I consciously process a couple more mails.
The important thing is that I don’t check my mails several times a day. I noticed from the past that doing this results in a day where I was constantly reacting on other peoples questions. My own work didn’t progress. So I came away from work feeling that I didn’t do anything. This was a big energy drain.
And yes, some days I’m not able to process any mail because they overbook this mail block. I don’t feel bad about this anymore. It’s better to answer a mail with 100% attention a day or two later than to answer it without the attention that your partner deserves.
I see a lot of warnings about not reading mails the first thing in the morning. However, I don’t have problems doing it like this. The risk I would see is that you would immediately be swallowed up by mails which would let you loose time for other things. By consciously limiting both the time I take to process a mail and the time to process mails in general, I seem to escape this trap. - show what I do
The first action point will make the time I spend on mails visible.
I didn’t do that in the past which gave people the impression I was available for questions. Nowadays they see an overloaded agenda and I have the feeling they are taking this into account by booking a meeting in order to block time.
This is also a time management technique because you keep control over your own time.
I also notice that this helps me, together with some energy techniques, to take up tasks that where I would otherwise procrastinate. This would drain my energy as well. Now I say “What’s on my agenda to do” and do it instead of trying to push it forward.
Of course, there are sometimes higher priority items that come in so I also spend time (re)organizing my agenda. But taking everything together, I think it’s a net gain. - Block big chunks of time long in advance
Every day, I block 1,5 hour for processing mails. I also block about 3 hours to work on projects of my own team.
That way, I avoid getting overloaded with meeting requests of other people. That’s important to me, because I noticed that too much context switching is a big drain. - respect other peoples requests
I nowadays often get the reaction that my agenda is blocked so long in advance. The first thing I tell them is that this is unfortunately what my work-life looks like.
Important however is that my next reaction is to listen to them what they want. This is needed because I realize these also have their needs. They deserve respect from your end. So I either- forward that person to somebody else in the team who does have time or is the expert in that area or
- look together with them where we could drill a hole in my agenda by shuffling things around.
This is part of my “40 days without stress” series. You can start from the beginning or go to the next part about energy management.
