Creativity Central [Marty Baker]

Last week I happily deleted 10,000 emails.

I was using my email as an ingenious filing system.  A filing system that I rarely used and just took up enormus amounts of space.

If escaping the gravitational pull of a constant flow of email feels like an impossibility, listen to the sage of simplicity Bill Jensen.

The Jensen Group researched employees in a diverse group of companies and discovered that 80% of all the communication coming at them: 1) Did not require action. 2) Carried no discernable consequence if they ignored it. 

They studied the frequency of corporate communications in over 225 companies and found that regardless of how the employee responded (studying the information, sharing it with others, or ignoring it, they still received the same message again and again.)

• There’s a 69% chance you’ll get the same communication a second time.

• There’s a 48% chance you’ll get it a third time.

• There’s a 36% chance you’ll have to show up at a meeting to review it anyway.

A few years ago, I met a senior executive at Pepsi and he told me that he was so swamped by emails that he had to take draconian measures.  The subject line had to include “a request or action needed” and a “due date” or he wouldn’t open it.

So how can you apply Jensen’s knowledge to give you some semblance of escape velocity? Twitterize it. Make the subject area your key message. Require an action or step and give it a realistic date.  

Jensen believes you can reduce your eliminate 75% of your emails if you scan for those two bits of information: action you must take and deadline for that action.  Then, just delete the rest.

Then scan the 25% using the CLEAR model.  Think of it as your own spam filter. The information within the message should be: 

Connected (To your current projects and workload

List (Next steps you should do after reading the email)

Expectations (What success looks like)

Ability (How you’ll get things done)

Return (Your WIIFM -- what’s in it for me)

For lots of free simplicity tools and book excerpts from Bill Jensen click:

www.simplerwork.com