Take An E-mail Sabbatical
Jennifer White, MCC
It´s amazing how attached we can get to our e-mail.
I arrived at my office a week ago, and before I did anything else, I hit the power button on my computer. I got settled in as the computer warmed up, and the first place I went was my e-mail program. It´s a ritual of mine to start the day by reading e-mail. I typically receive close to 100 messages a day, and this is the best way I´ve found to keep myself on top of it all.
I´m on high-speed Internet access, so when my e-mailbox remained empty after five minutes, I knew something wasn´t right. Patient, I moved on to complete other work. Surely my e-mail would start working again.
That was seven days ago. And still no e-mail.
No, I haven´t waited seven days to communicate. We had my message routed to another place while my vendor fussed, overhauled and fixed the system. But that took two days to get in place. Yes, I ranted and raved. Yes, I´m still a little bit annoyed. But what has been interesting is how dependent I am on e-mail.
Are you? I have four key employees who live in four different states and 50 coaches who are scattered throughout the US and Canada. I´m a huge believer in running a virtual operation, mostly because it allows me to maintain the lifestyle I want to live. And I spend more time on e-mail than I do anything else. We schedule meetings, send documents and solve problems via e-mail. People get nervous if they don´t hear from me in a few hours -- most folks know I´m much faster at responding to e-mail than I ever will be returning phone calls.
For two days, I didn´t have access. It´s not like I was on vacation where I love having space to not read e-mail. We had work to do, and I found myself being the one who held things up. Why? No e-mail.
I strongly recommend you take two full working days off e-mail. Don´t pick a week when you´re traveling or not in the office. Be in the office and cut yourself off. It´s powerful what you´ll learn from doing this. Here´s what you may discovered during your forced e-mail sabbatical.
1. Your top performers will rise to the occasion.
As soon as folks realized I wasn´t able to communicate via e-mail, my staff immediately started solving problems on their own. This happened at the right time because we had recently implemented new processes that I was driving. And without e-mail support, someone else had to pick up the slack. They did. What really happened was my trust in them went sky high.
For very strong leaders reading this, you may have the same challenge I do. With e-mail, you can stay in constant communication with your team and guide their activities. In essence, you´re the reason they do what they do. Without you there all the time, you may discover that your team is a lot more efficient than you thought. I discovered through my e-mail sabbatical that I´m involved in a lot of activities I shouldn´t be. And I never would have seen that if I didn´t have an e-mail break.
2. More than half your e-mail is not important.
I´m not talking about junk mail here. I´m talking about all the things you´re copied on that you´ll never miss. When I finally got back on e-mail, I realized more than half of the e-mail I receive adds no value at all. My first focus was to let folks know what to copy me on - and what not too. The volume of messages went down right away. And yours will, too.
3. You´ll have some room to breathe.
What I also noticed was without e-mail; I all of a sudden had a lot more time in my day. Last week was perhaps the most productive week I had. Those two days without access allowed me to do things I never seem to have time to do. No, not the someday-I´ll-clean-my-desk stuff, the good stuff.
Here´s my challenge to you: turn off your e-mail and spend two days without it. You just may discover something about yourself you didn´t know.
Author
Jennifer White is the founder and CEO of The Coaching Group, the fastest-growing executive coaching firm in the US, and the author of the soon-to-be-released book, "Drive Your People Wild Without Driving Them Crazy." You can reach her at http://www.wildorcrazy.com or (816) 347-9595.
