It is 4:30 pm on a Thursday. I have been in phone conferences, webexs, and in-person meetings since 8am.
I finally return to my desk and open outlook.
That’s when I see it: 102 unread emails as of 8:05 a.m.
I’m horrified.
I knew that to get control over my day, I needed to change my approach to meetings and emails.
This is what I did:
Meetings:
- Decline corporate WebEx’s by default. My segment’s Q1 results are interesting, but ultimately don’t help me do my job. All of these corporate update meetings are summarized in blog posts or official emails anyway, so I just read those.
- Decline other people’s training sessions. My company is great about including everyone in training sessions. However, attending a 2-hour session PPC keyword bidding is probably not a great use of an account manager’s time. Again – these sessions are always recorded and summarized, so I can easily catch-up on a Friday afternoon if I need to.
- Schedule hour-long client meetings. I try to block off an entire hour for every client phone call, even if I know it’s going to be a 15-minute chat. This prevents people from crowding my schedule and allows me to have undisturbed email/workflow time if the call ends early.
- Avoid back-to-back meetings. Someone is inevitably late (or unable to get the technology to work properly) so it’s better to have a 30-minute buffer between all meetings. This also allows for inbox-taming in between meetings.
Email:
- Mass delete the junk first. I delete the automatically generated system emails and irrelevant list-serv conversations first, so I get a better of idea of how my inbox truly looks. I’ve also set up auto-file rules for the most irrelevant automatic emails.
- One issue or client at a time. I do an inbox search for a client’s name and do all of their requests at once. This allows me to respond with a single status update instead of 5 or 10.
- Avoid Long Emails. Lengthy emails tend to inspire longer replies. If the email is going to take me more than 5 minutes to write, I just call the person.
- Staying in my lane. It’s really easy to get sucked into the weeds when discussing strategy with teammates. It’s fun, but ultimately doesn’t help me get my account/project management duties done. I try to ask specific questions so I can get my role done, and leave the tactics others.
- Do short tasks immediately. In GTD-fashion, everything that takes less than 2 minutes gets done immediately.
Of course the day after I launched my “reclaim the day” plan, I was forced to attend an all-day, off-site training session.
Perhaps things will get better on Monday…
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