Email-Free Fridays

Intel recently joined U.S. Cellular and PBD Worldwide Fulfillment Services as another company with Email-free Fridays. On these days (sometimes known as Zero Email Fridays), email is not strictly forbidden, but it's discouraged in favor of more personal communications such as on the phone or in person. The benefits are twofold: greater employee interaction, and improved productivity.

I don't know about the employee interaction aspect of it (don't you have way too many meetings already?), but people certainly waste a lot of time with email. Seriously, when you get to work tomorrow, start a running tally of how many emails you get. Make a note of how many of these emails actually matter. For an email to "actually matter," it has to cause you to take action. If you don't do anything different as a result of reading an email, then either you're really lazy, or the email didn't matter.

Among the emails that don't matter, we can count those sent back and forth between people on a mailing list that you're somehow on in spite of it having nothing to do with your job. We can also include emails about work that you're not supposed to do yet, because by the time you get started the details will have changed. And of course, we can't forget spam, which tops non-spam emails in quantity, and sadly sometimes in quality as well.

When you have a steady flow of email coming in throughout the day, you might as well schedule a recurring event in your Outlook calendar titled "Lose your train of thought in order to do something that doesn't matter." Every interruption requires a psychological change of gears to get back to what you were doing, and enough of them can easily shoot a large part of the day. Many of those interruptions are avoidable simply by cutting back on unnecessary emails.

When PBD instituted Email-free Fridays, they noticed that the number of emails sent dropped by 75%. In other words, when people got into the habit of not sending emails on Friday, they carried this habit over to Monday-Thursday too. That's a sign of a good policy, when people voluntarily take it beyond what's required.

Most of us don't exactly have the option of giving up email on Fridays, but one simple step you can take in the right direction is just to check email less frequently. Instead of having your mailbox refresh every minute, try once an hour. You'll still get as many emails, but you'll be able to deal with them much more efficiently by batching them together. I know someone who had the gutzpah to send an email to her entire company saying that from then on she'd only be checking email twice a day! It went over well, but use this trick at your own risk...