No 1 - News You Can Use - November 2008
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Dear Subscriber,
Welcome to the first Peter Gerlach International newsletter and to my new website www.petergerlach.com
Thank you for subscribing and for those of you previously familiar with the “Outstanding Achievements” newsletters, theses have now been integrated into Peter Gerlach International.
Over the last year or so, I have been through a re-focusing process with myself and my business, looking at and assessing how to best focus my skills, passions and knowledge to make an even greater impact on people and their businesses.
My new website: www.petergerlach.com reflects that change and I am very grateful to Edward from OFEC (www.ofec.co.uk) for his creative input and patience.
Today I want to focus on e-mail as it is becoming more and more dominant in our lives. Years ago, the average person received just a few e-mails a day. Nowadays there are people who receive several e-mails every minute. They may use Blackberries to catch up with their e-mails during breaks, whilst travelling or on holiday. It seems that e-mail has taken over our lives and many companies expect us to read and reply to them immediately. By replying to all of these e-mails, we also then encourage people to write more and more e-mails and where does this all end?
With writing and reading so many e-mails, do we still have time to do 'real' work? Here are a few tips to help reduce the time spent on e-mails:
Set the right expectations with your client and office team at the beginning. This would include how you prefer to communicate, whether via e-mail or phone. Sometimes a phone conversation or message can be more effective and faster than spending 30 minutes writing an e-mail to explain the same thing.
E-mails can be a big distracter, time waster and cause of stress. The question to ask is “Is it really so important to reply to this person right now?”
* Make sure that you have a very good spam filter. I know of a speaker who had to spend over an hour every day separating his 'real' e-mails from the rubbish and over the years, I have found “McAfee” to be one of the best of the spam filters. A good spam filter saves you time as well as protecting your computer from those troublesome viruses.
* Communicate clearly to your colleagues and/or PA if you do not want/need to be cc’d in some of the e-mails. Again, set expectations up front.
When someone sends you an e-mail, you could set an automated reply message to say that you have received the e-mail and that you may choose to respond via a different medium. This ensures that others know that you have received it and saves them and you time when following up for an answer.
Some e-mails are very long, containing too many words. Keep them short and sweet. No more than 50 words. This way it is more likely that they are read.
All the very best for now,
Peter
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