In the previous part of this series on productivity hacks with Microsoft Outlook, I wrote about the importance of offline work, reducing the number of emails to deal with and sorting them for work. Now, it is time to plan your work wisely.
Hack # 4. Book Time for Work in your Calendar
The unifying idea of all time management and “getting things done” techniques is to achieve or complete something. You should understand what to do, how to do it, and when you will do it, and be motivated to do that. In other words, you ought to have the following key components:
defined task;
knowledge about dealing with it;
resources needed to complete the task (time, energy, money, the help of other people, etc.);
understanding how completing this task contributes to your goal(s).
If you miss at least one of them, the chances of not succeeding are pretty high, and the most common complaint people have is a lack of time.
Most Outlook calendars I see are used for booking time for meetings only. I also used to work with the calendar this way until I came across a simple but essential idea in one of the books on time management: to get the work done, you actually should schedule when to do it. Unless you booked some time required to do a task in your calendar, that task is just an intention without a clear understanding of how and when to implement it.
My second observation about calendars is that people tend to treat free time on your timetable, well, as free time. For people who want to meet or talk with you, it is like an invitation to go and make an appointment. Imagine now that you wanted to do some critical work today before lunchtime and had no appointments in your calendar for that time. You came to the office and sat down to work. Meanwhile, you got an invitation to a meeting in 15 minutes, then one more in an hour or so. You might get angry, distracted, and ultimately fail at your task to get the job done before lunch. Of course, you might decline those invitations, but to do so, you still have to switch from your task in hand, write a response, probably explaining why you cannot attend it or suggest moving the meeting to another time. All these operations introduce delays and unrecoverable time losses.
So why not book this time in your calendar to work on that critical task? Firstly, it will be more visual to understand what and when you will do. Also, you will have some understanding of how much time you will need for a task and, therefore, better understand your performance and capacity when providing your colleagues with estimates on new jobs. Besides, when other people make an appointment with you, they will likely schedule it in your free time in your calendar, so you receive fewer interruptions while doing focused work.
Bonus Hack. Do not use email to solve problems
It might not be easy to notice, but issues or misunderstandings in conversations are rarely resolved by writing more emails. Moreover, writing responses by itself might take a lot of your time. Unless writing emails is your job, I strongly encourage you to spend as little time as possible answering emails. Just think how much time you could have worked on the really important stuff for you instead of engaging in time-wasting email ping-pong.
At some stage of email exchange, it might be more reasonable and more productive to have a short call or a stand-up meeting to quickly discuss and decide on the topic rather than blowing up an email thread with dozens of additional messages that distract you and your colleagues from doing actual work.
I did not realize this idea until one of my more experienced colleagues told me a simple truth: “Business is done at a table when you have live conversations with other people and not in emails. Emails should be used only to inform about something or arrange an appointment to discuss matters.” Since then, I have asked myself each time I think about answering an email whether there is a better option.
Will spending the next 10 to 20 minutes compiling a response be productive, or are there more efficient ways to deal with a task? How effective will you be if you answer 10 emails daily? Or 20 emails? Or 50? Do not fall into the trap of giving away control over your work to the flow of incoming emails. Remember that the goal of productive work is about a result, not a few more useless bites on an email server. So, before hitting the Reply button, consider whether your response moves you toward the result. Applying the preliminary sorting and evaluation of emails described in section 3 will help protect you from compulsive replies and generating tons of worthless emails. The delay introduced by sorting and categorizing new emails will give you space to plan more reasonable reactions than just writing more emails.
I hope you find these email hacks helpful in your day-to-day work with Microsoft Outlook or another email client. You are welcome to share your email hacks in the comments!
