In This Episode…
In yesterday’s episode of the Profit Productivity Podcast, I talked about what I felt was the importance of giving at least an acknowledgement of receipt as a response to e mails you receive.
After reflecting on this for 24 hours, I’ve realised I need to expand on what I said yesterday. However in doing so, it might sound like I am contradicting myself.
Hear me out and let me know what you think.
Episode Transcript (Edited)…
Hi and welcome to today’s episode of the Profit Productivity Podcast. It’s your host, Michael Tipper. Who else would it be?
Now today’s episode is going to be called, “This Might Sound Like A Contradiction To Yesterday’s Episode, But Hear Me Out”.
So yesterday’s episode which I called “When It Comes To Email, Any Response Is Better Than Zero Response“, I basically created a case why when you are dealing with email, at least an acknowledgement that an email has arrived is a good thing to do. This is so people feel they are being listened to.
What I want to do today is I want to add to that.
Before I do, let me just reflect on one of the steps in my Productivity Improvement Operating System, which is the last step, Continuous Improvement.
One of the things I’ve realised as I’ve developed my skills and as I’ve developed my knowledge is that you iterate your way to success.
You try something, it works or it partially works, so you make it better. You see whether it works, if it doesn’t, you keep fixing it. And so that’s a key tenant of my own drive to develop my own personal productivity and also to help others do the same.
So just bear that in mind when I’m talking about what I’m about to share with you.
So the statement I’m going to make, which will sound like the contradiction to yesterday, is that your job is not to answer emails. Email is a tool to help you do your job.
Implicit in that, in that, and this is where the contradiction may appear, is that you can ignore some of the emails that come your way.
But yesterday I was saying that any response is better than no response. So it appears to contradict what I’ve said. So hear me out on this one.
My productivity improvement operating system says that we iterate our way to success. The fifth step is continuous improvement – constantly getting things better.
And what I’ve done, is I’ve reflected on what I said yesterday and the sentiments were that any response to an email is better than no response.
Today’s other sentiment is that you can ignore some emails. That’s where there’s this contradiction.
I think what I’ve realised in sharing those two statements, because nothing really has changed about my philosophy dealing with emails, is I’ve just got the order in which I shared them the wrong way round.
I think the better way of me approaching this is probably this way around.
I should have started with “your job is not to answer emails. Email is a tool to help you do your job,”
This means you can probably ignore quite a big chunk of emails if you go down the route of filtering them out and focus on only dealing with the emails that contribute and support your main thing.
Now inherent in that WILL be the need to ignore lots of other emails. So I should have started there.
What I should have said was with the subset that you choose to action and process and deal with, then any response is better than no response.
So you create a dialogue, a proper formal dialogue of responding and acknowledging and positive reinforcement within the email framework with those people who you want to deal with.
And then you shut out all the other noise.
So the development of personal productivity skills is an evolutionary process. We iterate our way to success. And the same thing happens with me as I learned to develop how to share these ideas.
And that’s one thing I’ve realised in the last 24 hours.
So that’s today’s episode.
Until tomorrow…
