You Are Doing E-Mail Badly: Everyone Is. There’s a Better Way.

Here’s a suggestion learned from the good people at Next Action Associates, a company that provides training in the famous Getting Things Done Method ‘created’ by author David Allen, a method which I respectfully suggest would help stressed out front-line officers and staff in the Service.

When I was Disclosure Officer on a major enquiry, it really bugged me that e-mail was the most used communications medium, and this meant (managers note) millions of emails and threads, all with multiple subjects, which had to be recorded and revealed. A massive and unnecessary undertaking when enquiries are already big enough! All when a phone call and notebook entry would/could have been more manageable. Rant over.

Back to the message from the good people. How often do you receive an e-mail with umpteen ‘things to do’ created within, all neatly bullet-pointed or numbered? How often does such an e-mail generate several bullet-point-specific responses? How many ‘To-Dos’ are created by one email, that have to be separately listed in your Task Manager (e.g. Outlook), but which can’t be dragged across from e-mail to the Tasks folder because they’re all lumped into one big block of text?

That’s the thing. A competent user of Outlook (Been on a course? No, me neither, learn it yourself seems to be the Police Policy) knows that an e-mail can be dragged and dropped into the tasks folder for attention as a at task. But….

It usually appears under that tasks folder by subject heading. Which means that a generic heading such as ‘For You’ is meaningless: and a multiple-tasking e-mail can only become one task in the Tasks folder despite the many tasks mentioned therein.

So their advice, and therefore mine, is three-fold.

1. As a sender, send one email per action to be taken, and give it a subject heading that helps the recipient see what the task is when it is in their Tasks folder. For example, an e-mail headed ‘Statement Required from Joseph Bloggs’ can have the precise instructions in the body of the e-mail, but with a heading automatically creates a sensible name for the related task.
2. As a recipient of multiple task e-mails headed ‘Actions to be Taken’, politely encourage the sender to re-send each ask as a separate e-mail with a more precise heading.
3. As a manager, promote the concept of the one-subject, properly headed e-mail so that people can manage their time better.

Because you know what? When you send a multiple-task e-mail in the 21^st Century, the first thing the untrained, stressed-out, busy recipient does is one, print out the entire email (and if it’s a thread, more joy is created). And two, they write down their list of To-Dos that you created, on a piece of A4 paper pinched from the photocopier.

Single-subject, properly titled e-mails can go straight into a Tasks folder, and be kept their until completed. In sight, but out of mind until action is possible and needed.

Imagine how you’d feel if everyone in your organisation did that?

Now lead the way.

For more on better use of e-mail, read Police Time Management, available on Amazon HERE.