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March 29, 2006
Defensive emailing
I'm finding that I'm spending more time in GTD seminars covering email management. It's interesting to hear how people are dealing with tons of email, especially on BlackBerry devices.
A participant in my seminar in Boston this week told me he does "defensive emailing." It's those quick replies when you shoot the topic, issue or problem back to the other person -- just to get it out of your Inbox.
Another shared that his group has implemented "Email Free Friday's" to encourage people to have more face-to-face conversations.
Posted by Kelly at March 29, 2006 09:13 PM
Comments
The best defense is a good offense so use your email rules to respond to messages.
If your name is in the "cc" field send a reply a long the lines of "Thanks for the copy of your message, I will review it next week (month, year or never)".
If you are on vacation or out of contact for some time send a reply " Thanks for your message, it has been deleted. I will return on xx, if your message is still important please resend it then"
The aim of these behaviors is to pass the monkey back to the sender and make them think about why they are sending the message. The last break I took I received 50 emails in 2 days (I didn't delete them just moved them to a folder) only 1 person resent their message 2 days later!
Posted by: Grant Boston at March 30, 2006 12:51 PM
I like the sound of defensive e-mail. Grant's response made me giggle - "Thanks for your message, it has been deleted..."
Considering I'll be leaving town for a while and have been planning my auto-responder, it made me wonder if the people who e-mail during that time *will* re-submit their messages.
On the flip side, I wonder how many people would be aghast at reading such a response, even if it is auto generated.
~ Teli
Posted by: Telian Adlam at March 31, 2006 03:27 PM
