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What It Means to be an Email Sniper

This article discusses how email remains the day to day communications pulse for most businesses, and provides helpful tips on managing email expectations

Your customers or clients are counting on you to be agile and responsive to their emails. Your colleagues expect you to act swiftly to their email-based requests and questions. Your spouse probably also sends you emails through the work day on domestic issues that can range from timings for next weekend’s BBQ to collecting a litre of milk on the way home. Isn’t it great to be so digitally accessible to everyone in your professional and personal life? Maybe for them it is, but maybe for you it’s not.

If your responsibility each day was only to manage email, then none of this would be a problem. Unfortunately for nearly all of us, our days place a far greater responsibility on us. Managing email is just one of the many things on our plate.

The problem is this: Everyone expects you to be “on tap”; you think it is cool to be swift, responsive and agile; but none of this does you any favours when it comes to getting things done. The constant barrage of emails and the inclination you have, rightly or wrongly, to deal with them on the fly is bad on a number of fronts. It is damaging to your concentration span and counter to your best attempts to give impetus and continuity to the task at hand. It also introduces stress points constantly throughout your day as a fair percentage of emails are vexing, problematic or just plain upsetting. Each time you put back down the task you’re working on to deal with the email that arrived 11 seconds ago, the task at hand suffers. This type of person is an “email slave”.

OK, you’re probably thinking this wise guy is going to tell me to create a couple of blocks in my day where I am willing to open, read and deal with email and at all other times, have my email closed. He wants me to be an “email rebel”.

Wrong. It doesn’t work.

Even if you have the discipline to stick to this approach, your business suffers from it. During your 4 or 5 hour black-out zone, there may be some truly time critical things that you don’t learn about. A client may have decided to email you to advise they need to re-schedule their 11am meeting with you. A staff member may have emailed to advise they are going home sick and won’t be able to have the financials you need for your 3pm meeting. Your business partner may have asked you a simple question which, if you could tap them a yes or no answer, could seriously shape something they had planned for the day. Your black-out zone may have worked wonders for your sanity and your concentration on the tasks before you, but it has put a lot of people out (maybe even yourself) and on balance, has caused more bad than good.

Everyone understands (or at least, should) that there will be times when you’re off the map. You may be at a seminar, on a plane or having a day off. But to be off the map for large chunks of the work day, each and every day, just doesn’t cut the mustard in the modern world. It will quickly wear thin on your customers, colleagues and maybe even the spouse. Your business and personal affairs will be worse off for it.

So where are we at? I’ve told you how destructive it is to be an email slave. Then I’ve told you it is commercially unacceptable to zone off for large periods of time and be an email rebel. What then? The solution (and it has taken many, many years of wrestling with this for the penny to finally drop) is to have a hybrid between the two. The secret is to become an “email sniper”.

A literal definition of “sniper” from the Collins dictionary is “a rifleman who fires from a concealed place, especially a military marksman who fires from cover usually at long ranges at individual enemy soldiers.” *

A metaphorical use of the word is used by accounting software company, Xero. In 2011, they created a Sniper team. While the rest of the team work on larger headline features, the Sniper team are focused on taking aim at smaller enhancements and fixes.

Here’s what it means to be a sniper in the context of email management.

Firstly, we don’t try to be an email rebel. We have email open all the time and we keep a pretty keen eye on it throughout the day. We have our fingers on this critical communications pulse.

However, unlike the email slave, we don’t deal and resolve every email the moment it lands.

Instead, we read the email (or get a feel for the essence of it if it is a long one) and we ask ourselves an important question: “Is it highly important that this email be dealt with now, or can it wait?”

If the answer is that it is highly important, then go ahead and deal with it. If it solves a major time-critical issue, or if it allows a colleague to press on with an important task that they would have otherwise been at an impasse on, then deal with it. Let’s keep the train moving.

But if the answer is that it can wait, snipe it. By that, I mean defer it. The method you use to snipe is up to you and depends somewhat on the email software you use. In my case, I use Microsoft Outlook and I have a coloured category (orange) for emails that have been sniped. If I read an email and choose to snipe it, I click an icon in my toolbar that gives it an orange category and sweeps it away to a cluster of other sniped emails.

As emails arrive, I visualise them as being a roadblock to my day. When I snipe them, I clear the roadblock. It is liberating.

When you deal with your sniped emails is up to you. I pick a couple of blocks of time each day and deal with all of them in one fell swoop.

While the main game in email sniping is avoiding constant interruptions to your day, there are several incidental benefits that you will start to enjoy also:

1. Over time, your delayed responses to most email will start to curb the expectations of others for immediacy (however, they will still get that immediacy when the issue warrants it).
2. In emails where you are the “cc”, additional context will have been added by the other parties to the exchange. When you eventually deal with the email, the issue will be more advanced or will have taken a different tack to the way it started.
3. Some issues, with the passing of a little bit of time, will go away altogether as they will have been solved somehow.

Email sniping truly is the best of both worlds – a workable, commercial compromise between the email slave and the email rebel. You still have your fingers on the digital pulse. You are keeping the critical things moving, but you are sweeping away until another time all of the unimportant miscellany that would have otherwise got in the way of you doing what you planned to be doing. Try email sniping for yourself. If you get good at it, it will change forever the way you manage email.

Article written by Darren Hagarty

Director of Australian Bookkeepers Network (ABN)

To find out more about ABN visit www.austbook.net