View Full Version : Handling The Volume?
I've recently been promoted to a management position, and my area of responsibility has been increased dramatically. I've been working getting things done for over a couple of months now after being a long-time Franklin Day Planner user and usign Tony Robbin's RPM planning method for several years. I really believe that GTD is making a difference, but only from the standpoint that things would be a lot worse with out it...
I typically get between 20 to 40 e-mail messages an hour. This volume is in addition to 1-3 voice mails per hour, A couple of walk-ins in an hour, and a schedule of about 80-90% of the 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. work day scheduled as face to face meetings. My department is at 50% staff for the work-load we're being given, and I'm finding it increasingly difficult to handle this.
I typically come in early to plan and leave late after reviewing e-mail, but I feel like I have no time to actually work on next actions. I've tried blocking time, and pushing back, but so far the demands of my superiors have made those techniques impossible.
Any suggestions greatly appreciated.
jpm
Anonymous
12-05-2004, 08:38 PM
I've recently been promoted to a management position, and my area of responsibility has been increased dramatically.
I typically get between 20 to 40 e-mail messages an hour. This volume is in addition to 1-3 voice mails per hour, A couple of walk-ins in an hour, and a schedule of about 80-90% of the 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. work day scheduled as face to face meetings. My department is at 50% staff for the work-load we're being given, and I'm finding it increasingly difficult to handle this.
jpm
Just off the top of my head:
1) You are spending way too much time in meetings. What are the meetings about? Who are they with?
2) Is your 50% staffing temporary? Should you be spending time hiring staff and training them?
3) What is the email about? Is it actionable? Why are you the one who should see it? Ditto voice mail.
4) Who is walking in and why?
5) How do your peers manage? Your predecessor? Your boss?
6) Can you talk to your boss about this? If not, you are being set up for failure.
7) What is your staff doing to support you? How can you help them support you better?
Mike
Paul@Pittsburgh
12-05-2004, 09:59 PM
Hi JPM,
Mcogilvie asked some great questions there. I won't repeat those, but with that kind of volume, I think it's important to address them.
The other thing I am wondering - how many interuptions do you get during a day as opposed to how much time do you have that is not interupted?
Can you turn off your email and let it accumulate and maybe just hit it in a few short spurts at the beginning of the day, lunch time andend of the day?
Is a lot of the email for reference - if so, can it be automatically sorted through rules and then you just read it maybe once a day or even once a week?
Can you group your calls - let them go to voicemail and then respond to those in a couple of sessions too?
Can you have an open door policy for just certain times of the day and closed door the rest of the day?
One final question. (maybe more provactive relating to your company rather than you):
Are all these emails, interuptions and meetings symptamatic of people not knowing what they are doing and why? Would the solution be significantly improved if everyone else was using GTD? Is it possible in your area of management, if not your whole business, to get a system in place, even a training day, to teach the fundamentals so that communication and knowing who has the next action is much more clear. I recently got the GTD Fast CDs and there is one comment David makes about knowing how well a business operates just from seeing how they use in-boxes. If the over all system is in a mess, then you as an individual will for the most part have to react to that - can you be a change agent to improve this.
Oh final question (for real this time) - just so you have clarity if asking what you want - how much uninterupted time a day do you need to work on those next actions and how could you create this time for yourself? Can you do say 2 hours away from the office even - would your management agree to this?
Paul
webagogue
12-05-2004, 11:09 PM
Just want to add my tip. Paul alluded to this, but, using Outlook 2003, I set any mail on which I am only CCd to be flagged blue. It makes it easier for me to know what needs my immediate attention.
pjuhl
12-06-2004, 02:43 AM
...I set any mail...
In line with Paul suggestion, autosort as much mail as you can into read/review folders for later (someday) processing.
Unsubscribe to newsletters no longer of intrest.
Book meetings with yourself (in a meeting room) for catching up and planning without interuptions.
Good luck
Peter
Anonymous
12-06-2004, 07:27 PM
In your weekly reviews, identify the projects you're not getting to spend any time on each week. Then inform the stakeholder for each of those projects that you don't have time to work on them, and they'll either need to give them to somebody else or negotiate with your manager for you to take time away from other things to work on them.
Just off the top of my head:
1) You are spending way too much time in meetings. What are the meetings about? Who are they with?
2) Is your 50% staffing temporary? Should you be spending time hiring staff and training them?
3) What is the email about? Is it actionable? Why are you the one who should see it? Ditto voice mail.
4) Who is walking in and why?
5) How do your peers manage? Your predecessor? Your boss?
6) Can you talk to your boss about this? If not, you are being set up for failure.
7) What is your staff doing to support you? How can you help them support you better?
Mike
Great questions Mike:
Here is a pretty accurate answer:
We deliver sales support to our field sales team. I manage a team of two (about to expand to 4 with an additional position open.) One person works with field sales, the other works with our partners to run test suites and publish collateral.
Weekly Meetings:
16 hours (two full day meetings) Management/Partner planning meetings
1 hour Team Management Meeting
1 hour Team Weekly Meeting
4 hours (Field Rep focused meetings--project related)
4 hours (partner focused meetings--project related).
2 hours (1 on 1's with my direct reports)
2 hours (Business heads of the various field sales units)
2 hours (Meetings w/ Partner Alliance Managers)
The killer is what appears to be the standard two day planning meeting with our partners or management. I've been on for a little over 6 weeks now and we've had one of these almost every week...
50% staffing is temporary. We'll double staff in January, unfortunately the heavy work load occurs during the end of the calender year...
E-mail is probably the biggest culprit. I'm just getting so much of it that it is difficult to plow through it all. I am pre-sorting to the best of my ability at the moment, but I've been at this job for only a short period of time and I haven't yet been able to come up with rules to automatically process much of the mail. Of course company "news" letters and the like are instantly blasted into the delete bin (Unsubscribing isn't an option...apparently somebody high up the ladder thinks their newsletter is critical reading material).
Probably 10-40% of the e-mail is actionable. I give a range, because much of our organization takes a scatter-brained approach to firing off 5-7 e-mails for a single subject rather than taking 10 seconds to think before they hit send. This is encouraged by the prevelance of the blackberry and it's continued use inside meetings.
(Personally abhor this practice... If the meeting isn't important enough for senior management to be paying attention, then it isn't important enough to hold, and if the e-mail is so important that it can't wait until the end of the meeting then ... sorry started a rant...)
Much of the e-mail is CYA material that I typically just delete. Not only do I not need to see it in this format, it really needs to be put into a weekly status report.
Some of it is project related and gets filed. The problem is if it's important enough to file, it shouldn't be filed on my hard drive. It should be going into our internal repository. Maybe we need to set up an internal wiki or blog...
Most voice mail are mostly incoming customer requests trying to subvert the formal request process.
Walk-ins are 50/50 customer requests subverting the process or social time wasters.
Management by Peers, Predecessors and boss? Ah, here is the sticky point. Peers and Boss all do MBI (Management by Inbox). I had no predecessor as this is a new position.
Yes, my boss is probably open to discussing this. I know he is swamped by e-mail as well. I have to solve the problem first however. I cant' come to him with a problem and expect a solution.
I've been working with staff on other things, and haven't done much with this issue. Don't quite know where I can go with this. Suggestions welcome.
Hi JPM,
Are all these emails, interuptions and meetings symptamatic of people not knowing what they are doing and why? Would the solution be significantly improved if everyone else was using GTD? Is it possible in your area of management, if not your whole business, to get a system in place, even a training day, to teach the fundamentals so that communication and knowing who has the next action is much more clear. I recently got the GTD Fast CDs and there is one comment David makes about knowing how well a business operates just from seeing how they use in-boxes. If the over all system is in a mess, then you as an individual will for the most part have to react to that - can you be a change agent to improve this.
Oh final question (for real this time) - just so you have clarity if asking what you want - how much uninterupted time a day do you need to work on those next actions and how could you create this time for yourself? Can you do say 2 hours away from the office even - would your management agree to this?
Paul
Two great questions Paul. I think the answer to the first is one of alignment. Yes, our organization is poorly aligned toward organizational goals. (Not sure I've seen an organization that wasn't poorly aligned.). That starts at the top, and I think at best I can align our team with the goals of our immediate team and with my immediate director (who has a pretty clear vision of our role and purpose). I think a focus on execution is probably something that we should work on.
As to the second question, I have some flexibility and could potentially do the things you mention. However, in order to do that, I'd need to be in a place where I was basically caught up on both processing and managing tasks. Given the time I have available and the current flow of incoming material to be processed, I don't see how to get there from here.
Thanks for the suggestions.
<rant>
I've been processing e-mail since 1:30 p.m central today and the e-mail count in my inbox folder has gone up instead of down...
</rant>
pjuhl
12-10-2004, 12:29 AM
<rant>
I've been processing e-mail since 1:30 p.m central today and the e-mail count in my inbox folder has gone up instead of down...
</rant>
Try applying the 2 minute rule, that should leave your in-box empty.
Peter
processor
12-10-2004, 12:42 AM
My strong recommendations are to get the following:
Managing Management Time by William Oncken. Brilliant insights into delegation and 'managing monkey's (tasks such as emails!). Amazon has this.
The other is my favourite of all. A grand integrator of business. It's called The Neo-Tech System and will teach you how to have iron-grip-control. This one is a big package at around $150. Call Neo-Tech Publishing and order direct on 1 702 891 0300.
Any one else here familiar with either?
<rant>
I've been processing e-mail since 1:30 p.m central today and the e-mail count in my inbox folder has gone up instead of down...
</rant>
Try applying the 2 minute rule, that should leave your in-box empty.
Peter
I was applying the 2 minute rule. The problem was that e-mail was coming in at the rate of about 1 every 10 seconds from about 1:30 to 5:00... After it tapered off I eventually got In close to empty....
Anonymous
12-12-2004, 04:54 PM
Yikes, if you had that many 2-Minute emails, surely YOU, yourself did not need to answer them..... right? Surely, many of the emails you spent your afternoon with were not ones that ONLY you could answer?
Couldn't such emails be filtered and re-directed to your assistant?
Or is it that you, in this new promotion, are actually expected to spend a full afternoon answering emails, which are arriving every ten seconds?
I'm absolutely astonished by how you spend your workday.
Have lots of people recently quit, and that is why you are so understaffed?
Yikes, if you had that many 2-Minute emails, surely YOU, yourself did not need to answer them..... right? Surely, many of the emails you spent your afternoon with were not ones that ONLY you could answer?
Couldn't such emails be filtered and re-directed to your assistant?
Or is it that you, in this new promotion, are actually expected to spend a full afternoon answering emails, which are arriving every ten seconds?
I'm absolutely astonished by how you spend your workday.
Have lots of people recently quit, and that is why you are so understaffed?
I was not answering every e-mail. I was simply processing them in the true GTD sense. They were coming in faster than I could _process_ them not answer them, I was even holding myself to a 30 second rule becasue of the volume....
My company doesn't believe in assistants. Maybe with my next promotion to director level... pretty much only directors or Sr. Directors or above have assistants.
We are a new organization within our company. We're at half staff because we are ramping up. Workload will drop and staff will increase in January so some of this is only temporary...
From what I can tell, our corporate culture has an expectation that managers spend 8 hours plus a day in meetings while responding to e-mail instantaneously on their blackberry and getting a good four hours of real work done. Complaints about the volume at work have lead to comments about needing to learn to "multi-task", which I believe is the wrong approach....
I too am astonished at how I'm spending my work day...
jpm
Managing Management Time by William Oncken. Brilliant insights into delegation and 'managing monkey's (tasks such as emails!). Amazon has this.
The other is my favourite of all. A grand integrator of business. It's called The Neo-Tech System and will teach you how to have iron-grip-control. This one is a big package at around $150. Call Neo-Tech Publishing and order direct on 1 702 891 0300.
Thanks Processer, I'll check out the Oncken book. I've read some of the Neo-Tech stuff and found it, interesting, bud difficult to comprehend and in places a little bit loopy, though in other places I think it was spot on.
jpm
Paul@Pittsburgh
12-13-2004, 07:53 AM
From what I can tell, our corporate culture has an expectation that managers spend 8 hours plus a day in meetings while responding to e-mail instantaneously on their blackberry and getting a good four hours of real work done. Complaints about the volume at work have lead to comments about needing to learn to "multi-task", which I believe is the wrong approach....
I know you can't change the corporate culture JPM, so this is a constraint you have to work with. But yikes - as an observation, this is such a stupid view of management it makes me shudder. How can any meeting be effective if the managers are spending their time distracted by their Blackberries?
I am investigating Blackberry and other alternatives such as linking my Pocket PC to my cell phone to retrieve email when I am in meetings/conferences or attending exhibitions when I have quiet time. But this is more the exception than the rule that I expect to use it during a meeting. If I was to spend 8 hours in a meeting but expect to do 4 hours of work, I'd seriously question if I should even be at the meeting. I know you probably have to be so skipping out is not an option.
I was reading somewhere about the myth of multi-tasking - I think it was in the Managing Multiple Projects book (great book). Multi-tasking is not the same as parallel processing. Multi-tasking is the ability to switch from one task to another very very fast. But all of your focus is on the task at hand when you are doing it. Computers do this so fast it can appear as though they are parallel processing. I don't see how you can be fully engaged in a meeting and be working efficiently doing email at the same time.
Paul
jmarkey
12-13-2004, 10:17 AM
I second the recommendation of Managing Multiple Projects by Tobis & Tobis. The book sets forth a tool to determine if you are overcommitted and discusses different approaches to addressing the problem. It sounds as if your new position might at least temporarily require putting in extra hours.
Anonymous
12-17-2004, 06:57 AM
It sounds to me like people in your company have a hard time articulating and defining wants versus needs. My opinion is that you need to ask yourself: What is expected of my attendance in the 16hr/week meetings? Do I need to be a full participant 90% of the time, or can I just tune in for 1 hour in the morning and one hour in the afternoon, and pretend I'm working in a coffee shop with noisy patrons the rest of th day while I sit there? If they're telling you you need to multi-task, it sounds like maybe that's what they have in mind.
Also, with your direct reports, you need to make sure that they know it is critical to their performance evalution to get serious about using the subject line in email to clarify what they want from you. You are in a sales organization, and they need to treat every message they send to you as a sales pitch. They need to sell you their request to get your attention, and not expect you to be their mommy or daddy and intuit what they need.
Anonymous
12-17-2004, 10:51 AM
I was not answering every e-mail. I was simply processing them in the true GTD sense. They were coming in faster than I could _process_ them not answer them, I was even holding myself to a 30 second rule becasue of the volume....
Today in another thread, someone posted one of DA's newsletters that may be of interest to you. Here's a small quote from the very end:
TOPIC: Magazines and other reading material
http://www.davidco.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=110
...Email Users:
Print out the long FYI, and cc:s
One of the growing potential sink-holes of your time is reading long emails you've been copied on while you're processing them on the front end. Instead, punch the print button to get hard copy to put into your "Read & Review" basket or folder, to be handled at a more appropriate time.
www.davidco.com All materials contained in any DAC Site are the copyrighted property of the David Allen Company. All trademarks, service marks, and trade names are proprietary to the David Allen Company.
We are a new organization within our company. We're at half staff because we are ramping up. Workload will drop and staff will increase in January so some of this is only temporary...
I hope you will update us all at that time -- I guess I am very suspicious that perhaps your frenzied work load will not decrease, so I do hope that the scenario you describe indeed is only temporary.
From what I can tell, our corporate culture has an expectation that managers spend 8 hours plus a day in meetings while responding to e-mail instantaneously on their blackberry and getting a good four hours of real work done.
Complaints about the volume at work have lead to comments about needing to learn to "multi-task", which I believe is the wrong approach....
I too am astonished at how I'm spending my work day...
jpm
I wish you well. However, I tend to agree with others' negative assessments of the Corporate Culture that currently comprises your daily life.
I thought I would bump this thread and give all of you an update on where I'm at after six months.
I'm still working to get GTD implemented and having more success than previously.
From a staffing standpoint we would be in better shape as we brought on three additional staffers at the first of the year. On the other hand instead of demand cycling down at the start of the sales year, it's almost doubled. I'm terrified of what's going to happen fourth quarter, as we have a sales "hockey-stick" like you wouldn't believe.
I'm still challenged with the volume of e-mail. I typically get 100 to 150 e-mails a day. A good portion of it (80%) is actionable and I hand off a lot of it to my staff, but we are all typically turning in 50-60 hours a week.
I still spend about 6+ hours a day in meetings and/or conference calls. I'm eliminating all of them that I can, but most of them are directly related to project work.
I've given some thought to our organization and have come to some conclusions:
1. Our organization is fairly new and we provide services for field sales. I came from field sales, and when I was in that role it was next to impossible to get any service from HQ toward a sales engagement. This basically meant as a field rep you were on your own. There were organizations that were supposed to provide support, but their results were always spotty at best. So as a field rep you developed a do-it-yourself attitude.
2. Our organization has come along and we provide much needed services and we've gotten a great reputation for delivering results. This is the good side. The down side is we've become victims of our own success. Since we've been providing good services to the field, we're now getting a lot more requests, but not more resources to respond to them.
3. We'd like to be more strategic as a management team, but given our current situation we are highly tactical. (This is true even of our center director).
I'm still looking for tips for handling the volume of e-mail. Thanks for any input.
jpm
Jurisprude
06-12-2005, 10:03 AM
Who are the e-mails from? Mainly all from different people or repeaters as you mentioned (firing off 10 e-mails on their Blackberry without stopping to think)? If the latter, you could tell them that to best assist them, unless it's an emergency (and explain what constitutes an emergency from your perspective), it would be most effective to save up their inquiries or status reports to a daily (or less frequent if possible) correspondence.
If the e-mails are coming from all different sources, what about an immediate auto-reply saying "Thank you for your message/inquiry; you can typically expect a response in (X amount of time.)"
Hope that helps...
spectecGTD
06-12-2005, 11:36 AM
I don't know where I first saw this idea, but it is very useful if your people are not doing it already and if you have any input into their email practices. It can greatly enhance email productivity. I follow it with virtually every email I send and I constantly emphasize it with my correspondents;
The subject line should be a useful & informative summary of the body of the email.
My practice is to first write the email and then compose the subject line last. It's fascinating how many times the essence of the email can be summarized in the subject line, and even how often the subject line can BE the message.
People with whom I regulary correspond know that I respond to appropriately-titled emails faster. They also know the fastest route to the bottom of my list is to send an emial with no subject line, one that simply says "RE:", or even one that says "URGENT" (unless it also describes what it is that's so darn urgent).
Brent
06-12-2005, 11:40 AM
...we've become victims of our own success. Since we've been providing good services to the field, we're now getting a lot more requests, but not more resources to respond to them.
How good is your company at denying requests?
It looks like your company may be accepting more work than you can handle. Your company may be moving into the stage where you can cherry-pick only the work that appeals to you.
I'm still looking for tips for handling the volume of e-mail. Thanks for any input.
A suggestion: Every time you process your inbox, move the contents of your inbox to an empty folder, and then process only the e-mails in that folder. Don't worry about the e-mails that are now coming in to your inbox; you'll get to them when next you have a window of time to process e-mails.
This way, you will only have a single, defined number of e-mails to process at a time.
I did this at work for a time, and initially colleagues would approach me asking, "Did you see my e-mail?" I'd reply, "No, I haven't checked my e-mail in a little while," and they would fill me in on the details. After a few weeks, they stopped doing this, and they no longer expect me to reply to e-mails immediately.
I appreciate the tips from my update. I've already created a "Process" folder under my inbox to start processing a fixed block of e-mails. I think that will help tremendously. I've been working on my team to focus on using subject lines and it's a process. (At least now they almost always include a subject line).
I'm going to also start blocking e-mail into chunks from those people who can't seem to get a complete thought in a single e-mail.
Most of the e-mail is coming from internal customers who are not repeat customers. The question is whether or not the majority of the work we are doing is going to end in sales. (Our work product is typically middle of the sales process which can run 6 months to a year). We're in the process now of determining how effective we've been over the last six months...
I don't think we'll have the luxury of cherry picking the work we want to do any time in the near future.
Thanks to everybody for your thoughts and help.
Brent
06-13-2005, 12:20 PM
Good luck. Overwhelm is a decidedly unpleasant state.
kewms
06-13-2005, 01:09 PM
Two adages that may or may not apply, but that I've found helpful.
First, if you have more work than you can handle, raise your rates. I learned this in connection with self-employment, but it's equally true for larger organizations. You may not want to turn customers away, but raising your rates can got your workload under control without hurting your bottom line.
Second, if your proposal acceptance rate is better than 80%, you aren't stretching enough. If it's worse than 65% or so, you aren't qualifying your leads carefully enough. Don't burn yourself out chasing projects that you aren't going to get.
Katherine