Emails, meetings and travelling

Business people tell me most of their time is spent on e mails or in meetings or travelling. I’ve been reflecting on this and have some ideas:

Emails

In 1997 I was given my first company laptop. Within a matter of months emails had taken over my life. They were supposed to help me, were supposed to transform my productivity and make me a great communicator. Hmm!

Now I’m told managers get two hundred emails a day – some with big attachments just in case it goes wrong and the sender can say ‘well didn’t you read the document I sent you’. From what I hear I think emails are killing business and business people – how can anyone keep on top of two hundred emails in one day along with effectively managing people, processes and production? Certainly not by email – as a medium for important messages it doesn’t work.

Professor Albert Mehrabian has been studying communication since the early sixties and has found that as far as feelings and attitudes are concerned 7 percent of the message is received through the words, 38 percent through tone of voice and 55 percent through body language, mainly eye contact. There is no body language or tone of voice, except shouting capitals, in an email, there are only words. So we are left guessing about how the sender is feeling and their attitude. Mostly, when I guess about people I get it wrong.

Perhaps 93 percent of the message is lost or misinterpreted.

Top tips for email

1. If you have an important message then pick up the phone or meet face to face
2. Set up a VIP filter so you only get to see emails from people who are important to you and delegate the rest to your PA or have them automatically sent to ‘trash’
3. Check you emails once a day, after lunch when your productive energy is at its lowest

Meetings

About five years ago I did some research into the effectiveness of meetings (Published in a paper called The Curse of Meetings, Construction Research and Innovation Magazine Vol 3 Issue 1 March 2012). Three hundred senior managers from the construction industry responded. The findings were both shocking and not surprising. Respondents were spending the majority of their time in meetings, many of which lacked purpose, didn’t have an agenda, started and finished late and didn’t assist them in doing their job. Also that they blanked out for significant periods of time during meetings and didn’t follow up after them. That’s a shocking state of affairs though like me you are probably not surprised, both of us having sat through many such meetings.

Top tips for meetings

1. Get clear on the purpose of the meeting – [why] you are convening it or going to it.
2. Have an agenda that clearly states: purpose, date, location and timings and bullet points that map out the process from meeting start to finish.
3. If you are invited to a meeting that does not have the above don’t turn up, though explain why otherwise nothing will change

Travelling

Apparently commutes to and from and for work are getting longer. We are spending more time travelling in spite of working from home and video conferencing options. According to George Leonard, in his classic book on Mastery, commuting is one of the “in between time” things that we have to do “before getting on to the things that count”. He goes on to say “if you stop and think about it, most of our life is in between”. What if he is right? How can we embrace travelling and make it count?

Top tips for travelling

1. Travel “first class” – you are fantastic and you deserve it and you will be far more productive in getting work done or in thinking through what you need to think through. And you will be more rested when you arrive.
2. Prepare for the journey – make sure you have got what you need for the travel as well as for the destination. And plan to get there early, rushing or late adds to your stress.
3. Challenge yourself – do you [really] need to travel or is there another way?

Contemplating a period, say a day or a week with no travel, meetings or emails and being freed up to do or start something great – what if we can’t think of something great or what if our something great is too scary? Well there’s always emails, meetings and travelling and if that’s how it has to be then these tips could be useful.