Blog 46:  Help!  I’m losing the battle of the e mails.  Who else suffers from e mail procrastination?

cartoon image of woman contemplating in front of computer
©ADDitude

OK, so you have done the hard yards, taken the dive and cleaned up your e mails.  How can you make sure you don’t get back to that spot again (overwhelmed by emails and an overflowing inbox)?  How do you stay on top in the battle of the e mails?  This blog helps you to understand why you may have been procrastinating and the anxiety that can be disabling that prevents you from managing and responding to e mails. 

Blog 45 provided some practical tips on how to get your e mails back to a manageable level, but how did I get there in the first place?  It’s time to understand the lesson of the inverted J curve. 

how anxiety affects performance
©Harvard Business Review

When you allow a job to get too big, your anxiety levels rise.  This rise in anxiety decreases your performance.  Stress isn’t all bad.  As the diagram of Yerkes-Dodson Law illustrates, there is an amount of stress that helps you perform at optimal levels but too much stress or anxiety . . . and your performance decreases.  When it comes to e mails, not responding slowly increases your stress levels as the bulging e mail box increasingly gains your attention and interest. 

The actions you took in Blog 45 has reduced the problem to a more manageable level.  The trick now is to continue those habits to keep your anxiety levels from going to the right side of the curve. 

Another dimension of anxiety and e mails is when you stew over responses.  Stewing over e mails and over reflecting on your responses is normal and a common theme amongst professionals seeking coaching and caddying.  So why does it happen?

Sometimes we get an ‘e mail paralysis’ because we overthink our response.  We can procrastinate in an uncertainty cycle as we worry about the right response or what others may think of us.  Maybe it’s because you think you should have all the information before responding.  Sometimes it is a fear of getting it right.  All these reasons can add up to a paralysis which delays response and again anxiety rises to a point where you don’t respond . . . and the e mails bank up. 

cartoon reflecting procrastination as a choice between later and now
©SoundVison.com

What can I do?

  • If you’re not sure how to respond or need to gather more information, just reply to that effect.   Something like “Thank you for your e mail.  I will need to discuss this issue with my manager and aim to respond by the end of the week”. 
  • Breathe.  You don’t have to respond right away.  Take some time to think.  And if that means you need extra time, just advise the sender with something like “Thank you for your e mail.  I will investigate this further and respond by close of business Tuesday”.  Notice in both of these examples you are polite and have provided a promise when the sender can expect a response. 
  • If an e mail requires more work, make sure it is on your to do list and prioritized.  Take confidence in your system.  If it’s on the to do list and prioritized, you’ll get to it. 
  • Crap writing leads to good writing.  Write a first draft to empty your head and get your ideas out and then clean up that draft.
  • Know there is no perfect e mail.  Give yourself a timeframe to respond (eg 10 minutes).  Set a timer and whatever is written by that time is written – press send.  And let go.
  • Believe in yourself. Back yourself.  Don’t overthink it.  If it is that important an e mail, ask a colleague to review your response. 

Try to see if you can see your response to e mails as a dual activity.  On the one hand completing the daily task of responding to e mails while at the same time building an efficiency as to how you handle e mails.  No more procrastination, no more paralysis.  Try and keep the process of e mails objective and keep the decks clear (small email inboxes).

Next week, the last in this series, will provide some more perspectives and practical approaches to winning the battle of the e mails. 

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