You farted... No, You farted...
For all of us, time is one of our most precious commodities and I have learnt (and am still learning) some valuable lessons in respect to managing my own time and making sure I get the maximum use out of my day and so should you.
It’s all too easy to start the day off with good intentions to get a particular task completed and suddenly find around midday we are saying to ourselves things like “I have no idea what happened to this morning…”
Or even worse you get to the end of the month and you have not achieved your goals or hit target…
I’ve become pretty good at juggling my time and switching from one task to another, but my best work comes when I have time to think, and time to do the task in hand well.
We must, in my opinion, all control the interruptions on our time.
But the thing about emails and for that matter many other forms of electronic communication between team members, staff, suppliers and customers, we all like sending them, but we all complain and bitch and moan when we are overwhelmed with our inbox.
and the problem...
We humans don't think before pressing send, it's too easy and the result is all too often...
A brain fart!!!
Yep, you just slip one out like an old person getting out of the chair, no thought, no follow up (well I hope not!!! oh dear!!!), just fire one off...!!!
However, used properly, emails and other apps are a fantastic way of communicating because they do two important jobs:
- If a little thought is applied, they help the sender have clarity over what they are asking or saying because to write, you need to think.
- They allow the recipient to visit the list in an inbox at a time that suits them, leaving them to divided the day up into task related chunks.
Now, this only works if both parties learn the rules...
... and how do you learn the rules?
You lead by example!
If you respond instantly to every brain fart coming at you within seconds of them arriving, you convey to the sender you are always available and thus your actions speak louder than your words, you give permission to keep doing it.
If you respond to business messages out of normal working hours, you don't help anyone, you just become cheap labour and I guarantee at some point you will rush with your response and cock it up, when you should be doing more important things, like spending time with your family.
Worse still, if you simple play email tennis with people, you are wasting valuable production time, and that is time you should be earning. In other words it is costing you a lot of money to not manage your inbound messages.
So, before you send that email, just pause a second and think. Is it important? Have you expressed your reasonable expectations for a reply? or is it just a brain fart?
With that in mind, if you need to contact me, then please don't phone me, I certainly don't sit around waiting for your calls, I got work to do.
Instead, I can help you more right now with my new book The Business Stress Buster Blueprint - How to grow your business without the stress, overwhelm and worry, plus my free most amazing gift ever.
