Stress control-Limit the Amount of Time Spent Dealing With Emails

 Limit the Amount of Time Spent Dealing With Emails

Technology is a wonderful thing, but when technology rules your life, then you have a big problem and very quickly technology like email can overwhelm you causing you to become stressed. One of the rules my team and I have in the office is that nobody must respond to emails for more than 60 minutes per day. The reason we have put this rule into place, is that many of my team and our corporate clients spend their whole day emailing each other rather than dealing with the issues at hand.

How often have you received an email on one topic and then have the content of the email go off in another direction right before your eyes? I was working in one corporate organization as an external consultant and very often all I would do is simply respond to emails all day long and get nothing done. Most of the emails could have been dealt with a 2 second phone call. In one of the offices I was working in, it was an open plan office layout and I had a bloke working directly across from me, who refused to speak to me or anyone else on the floor and all he did was when he had an issue, he would send an email.

This is a crazy way to do business and it does not work and only causes technology stress. My solution, each time he emailed me, I simply spoke the answer back to him. He got the point after a while and my email load went down when he spoke to me rather than emailed me. Technology is supposed to make life easier, not take over your life, so if you have a question and the person is sitting in the next office, get up and knock on their door and ask the question.

By doing this you are undertaking item number 6 which is limiting your emails and item number 3 which is get up and do some office exercises. That little bit of walking will help get the blood flowing through you veins.