Stop Reading Email
We asked one of the managers we coached to count his emails. He had more than 6,000 emails in his inbox, more than half of them unread. We asked him how he felt each time he opened his inbox. He said, ‘Completely hopeless.’ We worked with him on a system that would allow him to empty his email, keep it empty and attend to it in a timely way.
It took him about three months but, during a coaching session, he said he was down to 11 emails. I said, ‘You’re so close! How come it’s not zero? ‘ He said, ‘I’ll call you back.’
In 20 minutes, he’d done it. A week later he emailed me, ‘It’s still at zero! My god, what a difference this makes!’
Let’s start by acknowledging the value of technological innovation and what it has meant for sales.
We’re both old enough to remember life before smartphones, even before personal computers. The connectivity, the access to information, the ability to produce quality material quickly and easily that we have today is simply amazing!
Yet, these advances have brought a new set of problems. One of the first things most people do when they wake up in the morning is reach for their phone. At work, all day long, they continuously monitor email, texts, voicemail, trying to catch up with everything that’s happening.
They do this because life in a 24/7 world - especially for those of us in a global business - seems to demand this sort of attention. And, if we don’t stick with it, it piles up and things get worse before they get better.
Managing the information flow isn’t easy. You have to figure out where to put it all. Usually, you turn into a librarian, managing an ever-expanding list of folders. Or, you leave messages in your Inbox, forcing yourself to look at a single piece of email multiple times before you can let it go.
Soon, your ‘to-do’ list is being kept in multiple locations, hours are racing by, the end of the day arrives, and you wonder where the time went. And there are still dozens of unread emails in your inbox. Add those to the unread emails that were there at the start of the day, and you realize that technology is running your life.
The problem isn’t email or instant messaging, or texting, or voicemail. All of these are incredible tools that you can use to terrific advantage. The problem is letting anything but your own considered judgment decide where your focus is going to be for the next hour of your life. Every time your personal device lights up, vibrates, rings or otherwise grabs your attention, and you respond, you are letting it decide your priority at that moment.
And that is a significant problem both personally and professionally.
The problem with email (and instant messaging, texts, voicemail, etc.) is that it tempts you into activity that lacks proper aim. By aim, we refer to the conscious planning of exactly what you are going to do next so you can exceed your sales targets in the shortest amount of time.
The chances of a given email, text, message, or voicemail being exactly the right thing to do next is infinitesimally small! And yet, when that chime sounds, that’s where we are tempted to go, and most often that’s exactly what we do.
It’s a classic case of mistaking activity for productivity. And it is a real problem, especially for salespeople and sales managers who need to be strategic, thoughtful, and intuitive in everything they do.
We perform at our best when we reside in a state of mind that we call ‘above-the-line.’ Athletes call it the ‘slot’ or the ‘zone.’ Classically it’s been called ‘flow’ or ‘mind like water.’ In this state, we think deeply and quickly, we stay focused and on purpose, and we do exactly what we’ve chosen to do to hit our targets instead of reacting to whatever has just grabbed our attention.
We don’t work well when we’re constantly interrupted. Sales managers especially don’t work well that way - neither do salespeople. They lose that clarity of focus that keeps deals moving along. They drift from one activity to another, the hours race by, and the things that needed to have been done to execute a sales strategy just don’t happen with the precision and the drive that’s required.
High sales performance requires being in charge of yourself, moment by moment. You have a natural ability and genuine brilliance, but this capacity needs breathing room in which to operate. Jumping from one notification to another dulls your performance by substituting reactivity for discipline and busy-ness for effective action.
The problem isn’t your technology. It’s your reactivity and unconscious attachment to it. If you’d like to experiment with a simple activity that creates room for you to have your technology instead of your technology having you, try this for a week and see what happens:
Begin your workday with a period of uninterrupted quiet time. Remove all distractions and take some deep breaths.
Plan your day, scheduling the important things to get done, canceling things that aren’t as important, leaving enough time to handle the emergencies that may arise.
Now look at your email and messages. Process them efficiently,* and then silence your phone, email, and instant messaging for a defined period of time that you choose, such as two or three hours.
Go do exactly what you've chosen to do as your top priority activity, free from technological interruption.
It doesn’t matter how long you keep your technology turned off. What matters is doing it and watching how you react. It may be a relief, or it may be rather nerve-wracking. You may even not be able to stand it.
Try it and see. After a while, you’ll learn how long you can go without checking your technology again. Most of us are not brain surgeons who need to be on call and available at a moment’s notice, but it depends on your role, the current state of play, etc. You’ll figure it out.
Start being in charge of your technology and see what happens to your quality of focus, the depth of your thinking, and the progress towards your targets. You may just surprise yourself.
* If you want help learning how to do this well, we unreservedly recommend David Allen’s Getting Things Done.