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How to be Smart with your Email

In an earlier article entitled 'Don't Let your Email Make you Dumb', I argued that email should not be used for urgent communication. When it is, it forces us to be constantly checking it, and when we do this, as the article points out, we contract 'info-mania' and effectively lower our IQ.

Here are a few quick ideas to help you beat - or avoid - email-related info-mania.

• Turn off the 'New Email' alert. The simplest and biggest idea of all. Checking each email as it arrives inevitably interrupts your train of thought, at best, or takes you off on a completely different task at worst. So don't do it. Check your email at two or three set times during the day.
  
  
• Avoid anything called a Blackberry unless you can eat it. Blackberry devices (which give instant, anywhere access to email) are taking email down the wrong path entirely, in my view. If people need to contact you urgently, they should ring you - or maybe send you a text message. Email should be saved for non-urgent messages which require thought before response. (If we create an expectation that email can be used for urgent communication, we are left with no means for considered response)
  
  
• Train people not to expect a quick email response from you. Unless you are in front line customer service, most of your email will come from internal communications, existing clients or others with whom you have an existing relationship. So train them to send you email for non-urgent communication and, if things are urgent, to ring or text you. Respond to phone messages quickly. Respond to emails less quickly. Eventually they will get the picture.
  
  
• Never, never, never respond to an email, text or phone message whilst in a meeting! Apart from being extremely rude, this simply perpetuates a perception that you are available to be interrupted anywhere, anytime. So next time one of those in the meeting need you, why wouldn't they expect an instant response?
  
  
• Stop kidding yourself that you are as important as you think you are. When you stand back and think about it, there are very few situations where truly urgent contact/response is required. Satisfy yourself that on those rare occasions, you have the technology at your fingertips to be able to deal with them. The rest of the time, chill out!