I will start with the end today:
- I claimed back on average 5 hours of every day.
- My productivity has increased from 42% to 76% (measured using Rescue Time)
- I no longer experience overwhelm as I did previously because I deal with one project at a time, every day.
- I am experiencing satisfaction in my work like never before.
I did something radical at the start of this year: I stopped using email.
And boy oh boy did it cause a riot. I had such backlash on Facebook and Twitter; and the emails (rather ironically) started pouring in with question after question.
1. How am I supposed to reach you now?
2. Are you mad?
3. This is going to mean a decline in business for you.
4. I hate social media, I don’t want to talk to you there.
… to mention only a few…
This all of course just fueled me further as it was proof that I was onto something. Generally when the norm is shaken, people react. Turns out that IBM’s people are doing the same thing. A few professors in information management are following suit.
Why did I do it?
1. Email was consuming my working day: I was responding to 80 emails on average a day.
2. My inbox had become my to do list.
3. I wasn’t getting the important stuff done.
4. I was feeling overwhelmed.
5. I was cluttering other people’s inboxes up, who in turn were re-filling mine and so the crazy cycle carried on day in and day out.
Do you experience any of the above mentioned craziness? Want to know how to change?
Here is a summary of what I have done:
- I notified everyone that I would be moving away from email.
- I communicated to clients and co-workers that they could expect a 14-day turnaround on communication via social media platforms: LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.
- I established rules for myself about when and how I would respond to communication.
- I spoke to clients who had legitimate reasons for email being critical to their business.
- I moved all my clients onto project management tools: teamworkpm, asana, Basecamp and Huddle.
- I set an auto-responder on my mail to state that I was no longer on email.
If this interests you and you want to consider changing the way you work; over the next month, I will be sharing my personal experiences about what I have learnt and the benefits I am deriving, 5 months into this journey.
See you back soon,
Claire
{Image by Micky Aldridge, sourced via Creative Commons.}
Miss Claire,
Indeed I was one of those backlashers, aye? It was because of you that I dove into Twitter and FB. How else could I keep in touch with ya?
AND I followed a link on your FB page and found this lovely site and this article from you.
Thanks for this piece. You are always making me think, think, think.
Blessings.
Have any of you found a great project management tool that can be installed internally, instead of accessed on the internet? We are trying to configure Jira with add-ons to do what the above project management sites do, but have found it overwhelming.
Many thanks,
Todd
Hi Todd,
Jira is more complex tool than the above mentioned ones. My husband is a project manager who uses Jira extensively and they have it integrated with Confluence. Whether it is offline or not, I am not sure. I will ask him and get back to you if that is ok?
Hi Todd
I have been using JIRA for about 4 years now and my personal view is that although it’s a great tool for project issue tracking, it’s extremely over complicated by it’s workflows and design, and has very poor to no project management ability.
I have tried to incorporate all sorts of team planning, risk/issue/action log, etc plugins to JIRA with little success. Most of these are 3rd party which you can only use if you self host as well, and limited support where there are bugs. My advice would be to use a separate Project Management tool, and keep JIRA for project issue and time tracking.
We use the Tempo plugin for time tracking, and although basic in terms of reporting, it does a good job of keeping track of where time is being billed if you need to bill the time back to customers. You can create excel exports and pivot tables for more advanced reporting (which I need in our case).
We also use another Atlassian product called Confluence which is essentially a wiki which you can submit posts, attachments, tables, etc. This is a great tool to use for a project to ensure that the latest documentation and information is all in one place, instead of all over e-mails and everyone being unsure of version numbers. You can also share specific ‘spaces’ with customers to get their feedback on questions the team raise and get them to post / access documents as needed.
Hope this helps!