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Optimizing E-mail: Stay Productive, Not Busy

07 2008 Friday

By Kevin Lawrence in Featured

Does email boost or hinder your performance? It all depends on how you use it.

Email offers us countless ways to save time and be more productive, but when we go on “email autopilot” - checking the inbox repeatedly, typing out messages that should be discussed, copying people who are only peripherally involved, and other bad habits we’ve picked up along the way - email can make us more busy than productive.

The problem with email is when we don’t contain it, our field of attention becomes fragmented. When attention is constantly shifting over to email, one’s ability to focus on work is severely compromised. The interesting thing is, professionals rarely recognize the degree to which email hampers performance.

In 2005, a psychiatrist at King’s College in London administered IQ tests to three groups: the first did nothing except perform the IQ test, the second was distracted by email and ringing phones, and the third was stoned on marijuana. Not surprisingly, the first group did better than the other two by an average of 10 points. The emailers, on the other hands, did worse than intoxicated people by an average of 6 points.

Yet, in a recent survey of 320 professionals, 17% check a few times per hour and 68% check email more or less continually - constantly breaking their focus on the primary task at hand.

Thanks to the Blackberry and other portable devices, millions of people can’t go more than five minutes without checking email… and we’re doing it everywhere we go:

In bed - 23%
In class - 12%
In business meetings - 8%
At the beach or pool - 6%
In the bathroom - 4%
While driving - 4%
In church - 1%

There’s a very good reason that “crackberry” was declared the 2006 Word-of-the-Year by Webster’s New World College Dictionary. Blackberry addiction was labeled “similar to drugs” in a recent study by Rutgers University.

Eight out of 10 admit using computers or other gadgets at bedtime and one-third of people make phone calls and send or receive messages in bed. One fifth check social networking sites such as Facebook, play computer games or listen to MP3 players. Are these gadgets improving our productivity and quality of life, or just keeping us compulsively busy?

Many global firms in Zurich don’t allow their bankers to check email more than twice per day. The reason? The more they check email, the more compelled they feel to send email. This highlights the unscalable nature of most time-management approaches: striving to do more just produces increasingly more to do.

In order to streamline your email process and make it as efficient and effective as possible, here are 13 strategies to consider:

Turn off the audio alert for your email inbox, and even better, when you aren’t actively emailing, turn off your email program.
Check email 2-4 times per day at designated times. Communicate to those around you that you now check email a couple times a day, and if something critical arises, they should call you directly.
For each incoming email, there are only 5 choices: handle it immediately; forward/delegate it; file it; flag it for later follow-up; or delete it. Don’t let messages pile up in your inbox or they will be ignored.
Address the message to someone if they need to take action; only cc someone if they need to be aware of the information you’re sending.
Make only one request per email, and discuss one main idea per paragraph or section. Then specify the response you want (i.e. a phone call, follow-up or appointment).
Never leave the subject line blank; use it to quickly inform the recipient about the message content, level of urgency and response required. For example: “Info on the XYZ Company deal - please review for accuracy and reply by 3 p.m. today.”
Remember, email is intended to be short. Consider adopting a 3-4 sentence standard, plus attachments when necessary.
Establish a company-wide policy against messages that say “I got it” or “thanks.”
Establish or circulate your company’s retention/deletion policy. How long should messages be stored? What are the criteria to keep a message? What are the criteria to delete?
Create a “to read later” folder for newsletters, education, and other low-priority messages. File them when they arrive, then go through them in batches when time permits.
Don’t write an email when it would be faster to pick up the phone (hint: this is more often that you think).
Avoid expressing anger or chastising someone in an email; you’re better off talking face-to-face or by phone. That way you can vent and make an impact without the corrosive effect of written words that can be read over and over again.
If a lengthy response is required but you can’t answer immediately, send a reply indicating that you received the message and when you will respond fully.

Take Action: Choose 3 Strategies

People waste so much time and energy (in business and life) that could be better invested in higher-value activities. If each of us could free up even a half hour a day by using these ideas, we’d all be a lot better off.

Decide on three steps you will take or changes you will make to streamline your relationship with email and use it more effectively.

No matter how you decide to optimize e-mail practices in your company, make sure everyone is on the same page. When every team member adheres to higher standards of email conduct, the amount of time saved collectively can be astonishing.

Kevin Lawrence is an expert at helping entrepreneurs and business leaders achieve breakthrough results through strategic business development. As a business coach, he helps leaders overcome major obstacles, deal with tough decisions and build higher-caliber teams to increase revenue, profitability and productivity. With more than a decade of experience with hundreds of entrepreneurs and business leaders across Canada, the USA and the Middle East, Kevin has a solid reputation as an agent of change. http://www.coachkevin.com Get the results you want… NOW.

How Digg Got Me On ESPN and Fox News

07 2008 Friday

By Brian Cuban in Featured

What is Digg? For those who do not know, I will use the description right off their web site:

“Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users. You won’t find editors at Digg we’re here to provide a place where people can collectively determine the value of content and we’re changing the way people consume information online.”

I will not go into all the ins and outs of Digg. You can read a good article about it here. You basically submit content you find interesting to the Digg Community. The community votes it up or down. If enough people vote it up and not too many vote it down or “bury it”, your submission makes it to the “Front Page” which can generate thousands of hits to the submission.

Is Digg beneficial to the “obscure bloggers” of which I count myself? It can be if you remember the key phrase coined by Viacom movie mogul Sumner Redstone “CONTENT IS KING!”. I actually thought my brother Mark Cuban coined the phrase until I read about Redstone. This is the golden rule that drives the Digg community.

What is your blog about? Is your blog about getting traffic from front page postings regardless of quality of the content because you are ad supported? I see a lot of that on Digg. That kind of content in my opinion is not king when it comes to blogging because it is almost always content generated by someone else. Why not spend some time building a loyal readership base with quality and or original content? If you don’t people are not going to come back until you have another popular submission. I want reader loyalty. I want people to stick around and look at my multiple posts. The only way they are going to do that is if they enjoyed the initial post I submitted to Digg. When a Digg submission of mine hits front page, it is just as or more important to me how many other of my articles are clicked.

There is nothing wrong with writing about other people’s news. Unless you are writing an original screenplay it makes sense to write about the world happening around you. The key for me at least is to take an event, even if 500 other people have written on it, and make it mine with original ideas, thoughts and viewpoints. If I can not add something new (at least new to me) to an event, I tend to stay away from it.

The tendency of some Diggers is to read only the lead-in when they digg. I try to create a lead-in that encourages readers to click on the link to my blog rather than simply digg and comment off of the lead-in. A bad lead-in can get an article buried as quickly as a bad article itself. The art of writing a good lead-in can be compared to a a teaser for a Hollywood movie. You want to capture the interest of your audience quickly without giving to much information. You want them to be curious enough to go see the movie.(your blog) It is a continuous learning process.

Do not be afraid of the comments. When a submission goes front page there can be hundreds of comments. Many of them are hateful and tough to read but if you shrug those off and find the meaningful ones you can learn a lot about ways to improve your writing and content selection skills. I routinely got tortured for my grammar before I started working harder on it. I still get tortured to a degree but the complaints have reduced dramatically.

Here is an example of how Digg recently worked for me resulting in two ESPN interviews and an appearance on The Fox News Channel.

On June 6 2008 I wrote an article entitled “Why Athletes Go Broke”. It went popular and generated 814 Diggs. This is a fairly modest number for a front page submission. In contrast, the actual article on my blog received 30 thousand hits. This is again, not an unusually large number of hits from a front page submission. The real benefit is the other search engines and blogs that pick up on this large number of hits. This process got my post noticed by the New York Times. The Times linked to the my blog in their Freakonomics Section in a post entitled: Why Do So Many Celebrities Go Broke. It was also posted in their “Whats Online” section. The Times postings resulted in my submission being picked up by news blogs all over the world. This resulted in two ESPN interviews and a national appearance on the Fox News Channel.(video below) I have also received several offers to write for publications.

What lessons can be learned from this? There are some that will say that this only happened because my last name is Cuban. I dispute that assertion. I have written many blogs that have gone front page and not generated any interest beyond Digg. It proves that Digg does work for bloggers even in the face of any disdain by the Digg community towards the blogging community. I have no idea if this disdain actually exists but I read about it frequently. It proves that regardless of any Digg variables, content will always be king. If you have content that is timely, interesting and hits a “public nerve” Digg will work for you. Digg is not just for distributing hard news around the internet. Digg can work to distribute your thoughts on that news as well. You just have to have something worth saying. Digg can pull back the curtain but the audience still has to like the show. Be original-Be timely-Be bold as a blogger. The Digg community will stand up and take notice.

Brian Cuban - You can read Why Athletes Go Broke here. You can watch the Fox News interview here.

7 Ways to Jumpstart Your Internet Marketing That Won’t Break the Bank

07 2008 Friday

By Donna Gunter in Featured

I’m not sure whether or not to pay attention to all the negative news reports about the state of the economy. For the most part, I’ve discovered that virtual businesses don’t quite suffer the same economic highs and lows in the same way as the rest of the country (or the world). However, in the life span of every business, there is a “recession”, or a point in which there’s a downturn or a decline of income. Typically, this recession period is short and cyclical, which puts the service business owner on an income roller coaster at times, especially if the business owner hasn’t developed multiple streams of income.

Google PageRank to Update This Week

07 2008 Friday

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

Over at his blog today, Google staffer Matt Cutts has revealed that the big G is about to roll out an update to their Toolbar PageRank values. From his post:

“Hey folks, I wanted to let you know that new toolbar PageRank values should become visible over the next few days. I’m expecting that also in the next few days that we’ll be expiring some older penalties on websites.”

This is sure to cause both panic and excitement in the hearts of webmasters obsessed with the little green bar and what it says about their sites. The SEO community alos love to discuss Toolbar PageRank updates ad nauseum so don’t be surprised to see PageRank fever hit the social media sites over the next week.

Please be aware that this is not a new algorithm rollout, but merely a refreshing of data in their existing algorithm. To learn more about the difference between Google’s data refreshes (like this one) and updates to their algorithm, see Matt’s post on the subject.