The Email Wars

The week prior after returning from the Email Experience Council event in San Diego we were asked to be interviewed by the local Portland NBC news station about how people deal with the volumes of digital communications they deal with during working hours. On average my sales and strategy team get between 300 and 500 plus email messages a day. Many of them are industry emails, alerts we set up to monitor clients and client competitors, as well as many campaigns we are opted in to to watch what is going on with certain brands we all follow for competitive research. I will be the first to admit that it is a little overwhelming on some days, especially when I have a day that is booked from 7am to 5pm with meetings and calls. Forget lunch, whenever that might occur is used to catch up. Are we information junkies, slaves to the industry, or simply information workers doing our jobs. I go with the latter. We have to be connected to excel in this industry and watching everything daily to do the best job for our clients and stay ahead of everyone else we compete against in the interactive marketing space.

Now they focused on email but when you add to the mix cell phones, Blackberries, iPhones, conf calls, IM, Facebook, MySpace (yes we use it all), Twitter and more how the heck are you supposed to cope with staying in the loop on everything. Well there is a method to the madness I can tell you. I have a system of getting my inbox down to 35 emails each night. They are things that need to be dealt with still and require attention. The other method is scanning for information and building smart folders in your inbox to sort emails into the right location.

The other person interviewed was so 1990 in her train of thought, or maybe we are not doing it right, but she says to only check email 2 times a day. Now tell me that you as a client could wait for me to respond when I have time. I work for you as far as I am concerned and am going to be as responsive as I can be. I expect this of my team as well.

All I can say is that you need a plan and a method to handle it. If you have an out of control inbox with 1000s of emails in it, set aside some time to get yourself organized and set a plan of action on a daily basis. My Blackberry is actually a time saver as I can deal with immediate things when I am away from my laptop and it actually gives me more help for managing my time than it does make me a slave to the industry.

Here is the video you might find it interesting.