Managing Your Email Before it Manages You

My guest today is Mike Song; one of America's leading experts on email efficiency and etiquette and the Co-Founder and CEO of Cohesive Knowledge Solutions. Mike has helped more than 5,000 professionals take back their lives by managing email more effectively, and he's recently co-authored a book containing many of his great tips. It's called The Hamster Revolution: Stop Info Glut - Reclaim Your Life! Mike joins me on the line from Connecticut. Good morning Mike.

Mike Song: Good morning, a pleasure to be here.

Rachel Salaman: Now email is one of those everyday things that people don't really think twice about, and we'll talk a lot about the nitty gritty in a minute, but let's start with the big picture. What's the link between email and productivity?

Mike Song: Well, based on the surveys that we've done of 8,000 professionals we found that email and related activities, like filing and finding information that you need to respond to email, consumes 40 percent of the workday, and that is something that has to be examined by every organization looking to be more productive; it's such a big chunk of the total time. What's more astounding is when you look at the amount of that time that people consider to be wasted, and they'll us about a third of that time or over an hour a day is thought to be wasted because of the low quality of email messages that come in or the simply unnecessary messages people receive. So I think of all the opportunities to increase productivity email may be the very best that companies have.

Rachel Salaman: And it's an unusual field to be an expert in. How did you get into it?

Mike Song: By watching people become upset about what email was doing to their lives. I worked in a large corporation and I kept hearing over and over again at the water cooler, at meetings, you know, "If only we could, you know, get less email we could get a heck of a lot more done." Or we would be in a meeting with people and they'd be looking at their watch saying, "I just know my email's piling up and this meeting, I shouldn't have come here." And as I kind of watched it really wasn't just that people weren't achieving their career aims, they were also feeling that their work/life balance was suffering and they weren't seeing that much of their family or they had to do email at night instead of do something with their children, and that's when it really struck me: what a huge opportunity. And as I looked around there really wasn't anyone filling that gap in a meaningful way, and that's when I came passionate about the – writing the book The Hamster Revolution with my co-authors, Tim Burress and Vicki Halsey, and creating the training that the book is based on.

Rachel Salaman: So just how bad is this problem in the corporate world?

Mike Song: Well, I think that it has so many negative potential impacts that it's hard to believe that some companies are still ignoring it. So for example, one major Fortune 50 company here in the United States, a very large company, just came to us and said, "We've kind of been thinking about what you've been telling us and here's the benefits we see. Number one we see it as a way to improve retention by improving work/life balance. We see our people getting more done if they have – if their inboxes are less cluttered with low priority email. Our Legal Department is chiming in and saying "We've got to reduce litigation" and the email messages that we're writing are setting us up to be sued." People are talking about efficiency, people are talking about stress at work when you're trying to read through a long wall of words message and you don't know what the action is. It's just unnecessary stress in the workplace.

Rachel Salaman: In your book you talk about your work with Capital One. Could you tell us what their specific problem was and how you helped them solve it?

Mike Song: Well like most corporations they were finding that there were three primary problems that were going on. The first one relates to the sheer volume or time that people spend on email and the perception that, and I think it's an accurate perception, that a lot of that time is unnecessary because a lot of email is unnecessary, so first and foremost we helped them ramp down the amount of outgoing email they were sending. We called this principle 'Send Less, Get Less'. When they reduced outgoing email by 20 percent they were able to decrease incoming email by 10 percent because of that boomerang effect that occurs with the email; we get a message, we naturally reply to it. And when they began to become a little more judicious with the email it saved them over ten days a year in email processing time with that alone. The second problem that they were having was they wanted to write more clear, concise and actual email messages so that there were less requests for clarification, so that things would get done. And we helped them strengthen the subject lines they were creating by writing more descriptive subject lines; instead of 'Meeting Notes', 'These are the Sales Team Meeting Notes from April 3rd' and putting categories, one word categories in front of those descriptive subject lines like 'Action Info Request'. My two personal favorites are 'Confirmed' which means I am absolutely 100 percent going to do something or that I did do something. That's real clear language for people in the business world. And then Delivery; if you asked me for something, Rachel, and I sent you a spreadsheet or a PowerPoint presentation I would say 'Delivery. PowerPoint presentation from today's meeting on widget sales'. So by being descriptive, using those categories, you can really get a lot more done, and we also taught them how to sculpt the bodies of their messages to write better, more clear messages as well by using something we call 'The ABC Method', putting the action or summary point upfront so that people can scan your email and know exactly what you're trying to communicate or accomplish, putting bulleted background points that sort of support your action summary after that, and then closing with your niceties, your next steps, and a good clear auto signature so that people can pick up the phone and call you if they need to. That ABC structure is really terrific and it helps people scan your message, which is how people read email messages these days, they're not really reading those long wall of words messages, they're scanning them. So that's how we help them with the quality side of things and I think that it was very much a collaborative effort and they had a lot of input too. We love to hear from our clients and really tailor what we're doing to their needs, but those are probably the two biggest things, along with helping them to coach each other to send more productive email messages, and I think that's the third component that made that such a winning endeavor for everybody involved, and well over 2,000 people have been trained to date.

Rachel Salaman: Well now might be a good time for us to introduce Harold, the hamster, who is the star of your book. Would you like to explain the premise for your book?

Mike Song: Well, you know, I always felt that parable books were, oh, you know, I always was a little skeptical about them, but then I started to notice that some of the books which I learned the most from were these books that, kind of, give a story or a parable. But I felt that one thing I would like to see for our book was that it would be based on some very firm data, some metric, some proven results, and that's why we included the Capital One case study, but onto Harold. In reading the book we said we need to kind of capture the angst that people feel about email, that in all of our surveys people were constantly saying things like, "I feel like a hamster on a wheel. I do more and I'm just running in place. I get more in, I send more out, and it just keeps going. I'm spinning my wheels at work." And so we developed this metaphor and came up with the title The Hamster Revolution and then Tim Burress, my co-author, said one day, "Why don't we make this about a guy who actually turns into a hamster because he's so overwhelmed by information?" And that was sort of the key that unlocked the door to writing the book in a very, I think, open and accessible format. You get to laugh, it pulls you along, and it helps you really get all the insights versus just a very dry laundry list of what you can do to be more effective. So Harold is this wonderful guy who's so overwhelmed by email that he actually transforms into a hamster, and the book is about his odyssey, his journey of reclaiming his life and turning back into a person in the end.

Rachel Salaman: Well let's talk a little bit about some of the tips that the Info-Coach who is the eye of the book, some of the tips he gives Harold when Harold comes to him for help, the first of which is reduce email volume. Now you touched on this when you were talking about Capital One... let's talk about Memail versus Wemail. Can you explain that?

Mike Song: Absolutely. When we receive messages and our inbox glows up we tend to get a little bit stressed by that, we want to respond to everything, and we get into a kind of a 'let me clean out the inbox' mentality. And we start sending messages just because we know that if we peg something back to somebody they're going to be happy, satisfied we got back to them, but we don't necessarily think about our recipient, we're kind of trying to kind of clean up our inbox, not necessarily satisfy the people who are receiving our emails. And our surveys are telling us, almost uniformly, people are dissatisfied with the messages they get from their colleagues. So the key is to really try to visualize your busy recipient on a busy day with 300 messages in that inbox, which is so typical from the folks that we talked to, and then it really causes you to pull back on the amount of email that you send. So for example you may get a joke from someone – hey, I'm going to forward this on to these three people, but then you may sit back and say, "You know, I did send them a joke a couple weeks ago, or a couple of days ago, maybe I'll hold off on this." And so sending Memail is really all about thinking about your recipient and we call it Wemail when people start to really think about it. They reduce outgoing email, they end up getting less, and then they start sending Wemail, and that's email that's really useful to your recipient, not just kind of fun for you to send. And that also gets into this basic idea of what's an appropriate email message. You know, we're seeing a lot of jokes, wise words of wisdom, which by the way are often hoaxes, and messages that are really not appropriate, not messages that you'd like to see on the front page of the newspaper or on the evening news. And so we really coach people about what's appropriate, what would tend to draw litigation or negative media attention and we help them avoid doing that and that also ramps down email volume as well. It's all about sending Wemail in the end and mail that's good for everyone.

Rachel Salaman: And you introduce a very neat idea, it's a check list, a one, two, three email quantity tool designed to reduce the quantity of email people get, and your check list is Needed, Appropriate and Targeted. Well you've talked about Appropriate. How about Needed; how does anyone assess whether their email is really needed?

Mike Song: Well we ask people, "Do you get redundant email, like three people on your team sending you the same message?" Or, "Do you get email that's sort of incomplete, not timely, not relevant?" They invariably say, "Absolutely, every day, day in and out I get things that didn't need to be sent, that were not truly needed." And in addition to that visualization exercise we really ask people to consider if their message is complete. I think that is one thing that happens a lot in this era of PDA's, when we can send a message from a small PDA to someone else we often say, "Oh yeah, I'll get back to you on that tomorrow" or "Yeah, I'll get back to you with that information later on today." And oftentimes we're creating two messages instead of just waiting an hour or two 'til we get back to our desk and sending that definitive message. So being complete I think is very critical and we're seeing more and more incomplete messages as a result of the fact that people are thumbing so many of their responses into a PDA. So that would be another great tip or standard for a team to say, "Look, try to respond with a complete message that's truly needed." And we certainly talked about Appropriate being those types of messages that you'd be happy to see on the front page of a newspaper versus ones that you'd be terrified to see on there. And the third section of that one, two, three tool is Targeted, and by targeted we mean using those distribution tools like 'Reply To All', and some tips for 'Reply To All' are, you know, you can send a message to a large group of people and say, "Please respond directly to me, rather than using 'Reply To All'". That will save us all a lot of time. Just that one little bullet point could knock down the amount of 'Reply To All' use for that team dramatically because it won't just be for that message; they'll think about it every time they're about to chime in using the 'Reply To All' which just about everybody agrees is a terrible way to try to make a group decision or hold a group discussion. I also think that creating sub-distribution lists is critical. We see a lot of teams, they have a major distribution list for all 50 people on the team, but there are subgroups within that team: the East Coast folks versus the West Coast folks or the European Team versus the American Team, and you can create sub-distribution lists and that also saves a lot of time. I mean, as far as targeting – one final piece of insight is that you always have to be asking yourself this question, "Is email the most convenient channel, the easiest channel, or is it the best channel?" You know, and I think the question is to ask yourself, "Is it the best channel?" And we see a lot of conversations that should be live between two people, a performance review issue, something that's sensitive or emotional, happening by email instead of over the telephone.

Rachel Salaman: So people need to get back to talking face-to-face in some cases?

Mike Song: Absolutely. Now one interesting aspect of that though is that when you say to someone, "Oh, just pick up the phone," so often you get an answering machine, you get a machine that answers, and now you're playing telephone tag, so one tip that's been very popular with the folks we've been working with is to schedule mini meetings. So if you and I need to follow- up on something in two days from now, rather than saying, "I'll give you a call" or "I'll send you an email," I would say to you, "Rachel, why don't we pick a five minute time block that's good for you and I, put it on our calendars, and try to keep your phone line open, 'cause I'll call you right at 11 o'clock on Friday?" And that way we schedule that important, robust two-way conversation without going through that frustrating waste of time of going back and forth by email, trying to find the right time to talk or leaving a voicemail message after voicemail message to try and catch you live on the phone.

Rachel Salaman: Well I particularly liked your tips for putting the subject line to work because these are real time savers, aren't they? Can you explain to our listeners NRN and NTN?

Mike Song: Absolutely. Another great reply, kind of, issue is that we often feel just compelled to say, to respond to a message when in reality the original sender didn't need to be thanked or they didn't need a reply; they're just sending you that information, so we've got a few of these abbreviations that have been really useful. NRN means 'No reply needed' and so when you're sending that message out and you just sense it's going to trigger that massive team discussion and you're thinking, maybe you're the leader of the team, and you're thinking, gosh, these guys are going to be talking about this for the next three days, if you put NRN, no reply needed, it sends that message, and of course you've got to talk to your team about these abbreviations before you send them. And NTN: 'No thanks needed'. Surprisingly, there is a very large group of people out there in the business world who really resent being thanked constantly; it's just kind of counterintuitive, but what's happening is every time a message comes in they are getting distracted by it, what that information is. They look up from what they're doing, their masterpiece, and they see the message, oh, it's just a thank you message; they delete it. It would seem like a very innocuous thing, but it's somehow consuming their attention and that's what I think is really a key to looking at your email strategy moving forward. What is your interruption management strategy? How do you make sure that you're being interrupted the fewest possible times? And having a team, sort of, philosophy of not thanking everybody for every little thing, but for those extraordinary things that we do, may be a good way to reduce those interruptions and get more done.

Rachel Salaman: Well you talked earlier about sculpting the body of emails. What tends to be the problem with people's emails? What do they get wrong usually?

Mike Song: I think one of the first things is they make that assumption that folks are reading their messages because as you're writing it you have to think about each word as you create it and go along, and you, sort of, have a tendency to dump backwards in your brain. We call it the 'Brain Dump Message' and my partner, Tim Burress, often says, "It's kind of like you have this big white space and you want to fill it all up with something." And so often people don't have time to read that large of a message, and so I think that wall of words style can be very self-defeating for someone who wants to accomplish something. Just one anecdote, you've mentioned Capital One, a wonderful VP over there said, "You know, our proposals to our senior level of management are getting approved more rapidly since we started to write more sculpted messages with that ABC tool because they can glance at it, decide if they're behind that project and approve it," and so we were able to cut the approval time for proposals pretty dramatically just by using that structure. So I think that's the number one thing is people reverse it, they think that people are reading their messages when in reality they're actually just scanning them and their message is set up to be read and as a result it doesn't get read.

Rachel Salaman: They have to realize that their emails aren't going to be read and then make them scannable.

Mike Song: You got it. If you believe that your emails are being carefully read and that someone has ten minutes to read each message you send them, you would tend to build your case for your conclusion over three or four paragraphs and bury that action you want to have read at the very bottom of the message, that would just be how you would design it, when in reality people want that action upfront.

Rachel Salaman: There's another little trick you can do with the subject line, EOM. Can you explain that?

Mike Song: Absolutely, when you can fit the entire subject or your entire message into the subject line you can follow that with EOM and that stands for 'End of message'. And when you get a whole team using this technique it's really pretty amazing because they realize, 'I can send a message of just eight words and put EOM after it and then no-one has to open that email message'. And that can be very effective; it's kind of a way of introducing an instant messaging style into email without having to open up your instant messaging system and select the person's name and fill it out and create the second channel to which you're communicating, which sometimes is not as productive. So you can send a short message that way, and people see if they can act on it, they can respond back, and it's all very quick, and we've had great success rolling that out.

Rachel Salaman: The language people use must affect the quality of the emails. Some people lapse into text messaging speak or drop punctuation, which doesn't seem appropriate in a work environment, what do you advise?

Mike Song: I think that it's really critical to get those basics down. I think you hit two of them right there. Don't ever assume that people know what you're saying. We see this with our clients with international offices; they are all striving to be as clear as they can. We had an American company that has an Indian portion of their company, in the country of India, and they kept using terminology like 'We're on a roll', you know, and we're on a roll means we've got great momentum for this project to all of American counterparts, but the Indian counterparts on the teleconference were kind of looking at each other, "What does that mean? 'cause that phrase did not translate well. Nor do acronyms. We find that we always joke that we want everybody to join the American Association of Acronym Abuse, or against the abuse of acronyms when we're in the States, but I think for, on a global scale, whether you are in Europe or the United States or Asia, limiting the use of acronyms when you're talking to people who may not know what they mean is critical, so you've got to try to explain those acronyms before you use them and then it can make your communications more effective. And then finally emotional content; the angry email message can be a career limiting move. It can absolutely haunt you for the rest of your career and it could be just one day where you felt cranky and somebody really got under your skin and so you fired off that angry message. We recommend there that in terms of the language that you use wait 24 hours, observe the 24 hour rule, and then sleep on it, come back, and nine times out of ten you'll tone down the message and probably do yourself a big favor, even if you were in the right, versus really venting via email, something we don't recommend.

Rachel Salaman: That's a great piece of advice. The third strategy Harold learns about is 'Info-Coaching sustains results'. Now this is all about spreading the word, isn't it?

Mike Song: It sure is. What we found is that just about everybody has something they can offer or give and once they take our workshop or read the book they definitely have ideas about how they can help their counterparts. So Info-Coaching is really a three step process. The first one is open yourself up to feedback, consider yourself a feedback dartboard and go to your colleagues, the people who you – your frequent senders and the people you receive email from frequently, and say, "How can I improve on email 'cause I'm really trying to do that?" That'll immediately in their minds build some credibility for you when you want to come back to them in the future, and you might get some great feedback about the stuff you're sending. I think the second thing is to walk the walk. Use that ABC structure. Use descriptive subject lines. Become better and better at email yourself and that really sets you up to say to one of your teammates, "Hey, you know what, I learned this great thing, you know, and I want to show it to you and here's how you can write a more effective email message. What do you think?" And you get that conversation going in a non-accusatory kind of way, 'cause people aren't used to being coached on this, and I think that's really terrific. And the final step is obviously to take your message to other people as a strategy, kind of move out there and say, "Look, here are some things we can do." And there are so many different ways that you can introduce the email coaching topic to people. You can put – just ask for ten minutes on the next team meeting agenda and ask people what's bothering them about email. Believe me, there will be things on their mind and you will get a great conversation started. I've run probably now 300 workshops and focus groups on this; getting people talking is a great strategy.

Rachel Salaman: It does sound like it would be catching because everyone wants to improve the way they communicate.

Mike Song: I think it really is and I think that once people start to – and we spent a lot of time on this in the book and in the workshop, of really showing how email impacts your professional image, which is that it directly does impact the way you're perceived, the degree to which people want to collaborate with you, the sense of is that a person who gets things done or are they a person who is really hard to work with and slow to – would they slow our team down if they joined our team, I guess is what people begin to think. And so you'll naturally, after I think experiencing this and implementing some of these best practice, you're not only just improving your efficiency level, you're improving your professional image, and what a great – that's a great bonus of this whole book idea of The Hamster Revolution. We want everybody to join, we want everybody to look a little better at work, and also we want to save everybody ten to 15 days a year, so it's an exciting revolution to be part of.

Rachel Salaman: Well the fourth and final strategy that Harold the Hamster learns about is, I think, one of the most useful. It's 'File and Find it Fast with COTA'. Can you explain COTA?

Mike Song: Yes, and I do agree, this is to me the most powerful part of the revolution, that it is – there is this missing link if you will in how we're all supposed to be efficient. You know, we get our job, we're going to buried by information, we're supposed to store it all really well, we're not given virtually any tips on how to do that when we come to work, and yet we live in the information age when the success or failure of entire companies, organizations and individual's all based on how we store information. So we think there needs to be a quantum change in our perception of this task that we often refer to in a kind of a condescending way as 'Filing stuff'. Very boring, right? But that's our knowledge store. So what did we do? We went out and studied thousands of people and looked at how they were storing their information and we knew that they were creating lots and lots of folders, usually lots of email folders, and they were, kind of, creating them on the fly. So we developed a very simple system that we could help you manage your information more effectively and here's basically in a nutshell what it is. Rather than having 57 folders that you use to store information that can be bad because there's a lot of overlap in those folders, so a widget proposal for General Motors could be under General Motors, under Widgets or under Proposals. So we thought about this a lot and said what – if there was one methodology to use you'd probably want to use content, so rather than organizing your folders by the person who sent it to you, the date or whether it was urgent or not, or whether it was a spreadsheet or PowerPoint or a Word document it's better to organize things by content. And once we went to a content based system it eliminated a lot of overlap between categories 'cause you could you have a widget proposal spreadsheet. And once we did that we said, "What would be the four or five master categories, master folders we could create so that we could chunk our information into logical buckets?" which seemed to make a tremendous amount of sense.

Well, we noticed first of all that everybody in organizations was on a team; they're part of a team, a division, a group, a department, but some grouping of people. So we said let's create a category called 'Team' and every one of those teams was delivering some type of value to some other team either inside the company or outside the company, and they had information they stored about that value they delivered, so a Widget Salesperson, he sold his widgets, and a Human Resources person internally provided the benefits package for the other divisions of the company and so on. So we created an 'Output' category for that delivery of value portion of what everyone does on the job. And then finally there was a 'Clients' portion and that made totally logical sense that if you're delivering a benefits package to the other divisions then you're going to have information that you store about the Sales Division and the R&D Division. And there was one other category that was inescapable and I think indisputable, and that was that administrative information is stored by everyone, but what is admin to the average person? Well, it might be an expense report; it might be your benefit statement, your individual benefit statement. It might be just anything that you have about the parking garage or something that's of a – some of the administrative kind of nature to you. It could be your travel plans or forms that you store on your computer that you need, or computer tip information. So we had these four categories and we, sort of, rearranged them to form an acronym: clients at the top: one, clients, two output; three team and four admin. And in the time we have here today, we probably we don't have the opportunity to discuss every facet of the COTA system, which is what that acronym stands for, but I can tell you this, it changed my life in ways that I cannot even begin to describe to you. To have my information organized like this, and we show there's ways that people can reach and, kind of, grab things very quickly, and we, kind of, talk about that in the book, once I could grab my information faster and file and find it fast I could respond to just about anything more rapidly. I could plan better, innovations suddenly was just leaping out at me, you know, I was a pretty good employee, but boy I rose to the top of the corporation I was working at, at the time by really mastering this management of information.

Rachel Salaman: Part of that is that COTA can be implemented throughout your computer, can't it, through your documents files, your email program, even your internet favorites, and that's what really makes it work?

Mike Song: But, yes, you hit it. The power of COTA is that it's simple and it's universal, so at many different levels it is, I think, sort of, the missing thing that we needed in order to become truly expert at managing information. So number one, you can organize your hardcopy filing cabinet with COTA and your My Documents or Your Computer Documents area or your email, and that is, I think, the real power; you can even organize a team shared drive with COTA. So that everywhere you look you see this one simple system and you open up that first master folder, boom, there are all the clients that we have agreed our clients as a team. That's been incredibly gratifying to see teams implementing it together and becoming very productive.

Rachel Salaman: And if you were to pick out three top tips for employees who spend several hours a day on email, what would they be?

Mike Song: Well, in addition to what we've covered today I would say I think that one would be to use a brief, warm greeting at the outset of your email message. We see a big need for people to be concise in email; at the same time we don't want to lose all the warmth and humanity of our correspondence. So what's a good compromise between those people who want you to get to the point and those people who want you to say, "Hey, we're part of a team together and, you know, just don't order me around like a servant," you know, people don't like that feeling. So a brief, warm greeting could be, "Hi Rachel, thanks for the marketing report you sent, excellent job." It occupies one line of text; it's right at the top, it doesn't interfere with the message or confuse what the message might be below it, but it really offers a nice warm way to get into the message and it reminds people that you care about them, so I think that's number one. Number two, I'd recommend if you have that ding that sounds every time an email comes in that you disconnect that ding, because that ding is a distraction, and there was a terrific study done in the UK by a Doctor Thomas Jackson, really wonderful email Researcher, and Doctor Jackson found that it takes 64 seconds to recover from an email interrupt. What a terrific study. So if you're working on some really amazing piece of work, maybe a business plan, a strategy, something that's a client correspondence that's going to put you over the top it's going to take you a minute to get back into what you were doing every time that ding sounds, and I think that is just a opportunity waiting to happen for people. So, I mean, I think that would be the second one. And then I think a third one would be to filter with folders, and by that I mean divert email that's of low priority to some type of pre-designated folder that you check once or twice a month. So I do this for newsletter, association mailings, I do it for mailings that I consider low priority, and also sometimes some vendor correspondence I will push to a vendor folder, and that helps me tremendously in not being interrupted. And that is one of the things that allowed me to write the book with my co-authors, and really concentrate and focus at a much deeper level than I'd ever done before when I was kind of like the Pavlovian response of just ding, ding, messages coming in, messages coming in. We all have that irresistible urge to run out and check what's in our mailbox, it's just fun to do. Maybe it's good news, we don't know, but nine times out of ten it's just the usual stuff we get every day, so those are three tips that I'd give to people who are trying to be more effective with email.

Rachel Salaman: Mike Song, thank you very much for joining us today.

Mike Song: It's been my pleasure, Rachel.

Rachel Salaman: You can find out more about The Hamster Revolution at Mike's website, [now www.getcontrol.net]. You'll find free email tech tips there and information about corporate training and you can also sign up to Mike's Tech Tip Newsletter.

I'll be back next month with another Expert Interview, so do join me then. Goodbye.