After some discussion the group leader we decided to focus on 2 areas that are major culprits in the “takes up a lot of my time” category of complaints. These 2 areas are: document collaboration/sharing, and email management.
For the area of document collaboration/sharing we looked at Google Docs as an excellent tool that help eliminate a lot of the wasted time and effort involved in the process of sharing documents. I would encourage you to have a look at Google Docs, or if you are a Faculty of Education (U of A) instructor feel free to contact me for further information and ideas. I may write a separate blog post on Google Docs in the future, but it’s a large topic and I would rather leave it up to individuals to explore the aspect that is particularly relevant to them.
Email, however, is an online tool I think we are ALL familiar with. In fact I don’t think most people thing of it as a separate tool anymore, it’s just an assumed part of our daily reality. If you were to start a new job next week, you would be expected to begin communicating via email right away. You would also be expected to inherently know how to manage your stream of email to do your job effectively and efficiently. However how many people have taken a course on email management? How many people have even thought about how they manage email and whether or not they might be able to implement strategies to make their time more efficient and productive? In my experience, the answer is not many.
This is obviously a big topic and I don’t intend to encapsulate it all. However I was asked to present a few basic a ideas to a work group that would help improve productivity. I have some experience in this area, so I encapsulated my ideas for them. I will start with a bold blanket statement about email management:
The key to email management is to break down your inbox into only those emails that you need to be looking at right now.
This is a lofty goal, but any effort to get close to it will drastically save you time and increase productivity. Maybe it only takes you 60 seconds to look at an email and decide to delete it or file it or mark it for later. But multiply 60 seconds by the number of emails you have to deal with like this every time you check your email and you are likely talking about an extra hour tacked on to your work day. And the 60 second estimation doesn’t account for the disruption in your productivity this also causes. We are not robots who can switch between a creative tasks and a management task without loss of concentration.
There are many techniques that can be used purely on a personal basis to help achieve this. I don’t plan to get into those in this series of blog posts. You can refer to my personal favorite resource on this topic: Inbox Zero by Merlin Mann.
There are, however, also some ideas of how to facilitate making your email management easier and more productive from a group point of view. Here are some of my ideas: (I plan to expand each of these ideas in detail in my upcoming blog posts)
- Use rules/filters to block or redirect “spam” and “bacon”
- Develop and establish a set of email good practices. Request that your group use these good practices.
- Develop and establish a common set of email protocols within your group.
- Use rules/filters to process and organize your email based on these common set of protocols
- Create a discussion group for email distribution of common interest content or funny content. Use the email notification options for the group to have daily or weekly digests emailed to you as opposed to every email separately
If these ideas seem vague and undetailed, do not fret. I have more detailed information to deliver for each of them. But I fear this blog post has become long enough, so I will save this further detail for upcoming blog post. However in the meantime I do encourage your feedback and suggestions on what I have written thus far.
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment