At 12:30 am on April 4th, 1841 President William Henry Harrison died of pneumonia just a month after taking office. But people living in Los Angeles wouldn’t hear about it for another 3 months.
Contrast that with the near instant spread of information today.
Telecommunication has a long history of changing the way we live and work.
Three years after President Harrison’s death, the telegram was invented. Suddenly communication was no longer limited by physical distance. Over the next 150 years, the telephone, radio, cell phones, and the internet would all continue to shape the way people communicated and worked together.
Today, email is the dominant and most convenient mode of professional communication. It’s universal, instant, and archives every conversation.
But this convenience comes at a cost. Ease of use breeds excess. Email has helped us be more productive in some cases, but the average worker still spends 2.6 hours each day sorting through approximately 120 messages.
“Email is having an increasingly pernicious effect. Not only is it having a perceptible effect on productivity, it’s skewing what it is we focus on. The immediate increasingly crowds out the important.
Noreena Hertz
Thankfully, there are strategies that can help us cut back on the number of emails that end up in our inbox. Today I want to share the “yellow list” that I recently heard described by Julia Funt, the CEO of Whitespace at Work.
Here’s What You Do
Create a list for every person that you work with frequently. Whenever you have the urge to send them an email, pause and ask yourself if an email is appropriate.
If it’s not urgent, or if it doesn’t prevent you from doing your job in the short term, then it might belong on your yellow list. Think of it as a running agenda of things to talk about when it’s most convenient. After you accumulate enough items, then schedule a meeting to go through your list face-to-face.
This idea works well for recurring meetings as well. I suggest creating lists in Google Keep (or similar) for weekly staff meetings and one-on-ones.
Yellow lists are a great way to batch all of your questions so that you can ask them all at once. They also go a long way towards minimizing the number of emails clogging up your inbox.
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