Tame Your Sender’s Worst Email Instincts and Stem the Incoming Tide

We know you’re drowning in email. We also know that the amount of time you spend daily slogging through your inbox is absolutely interfering with your ability to implement The Breakthrough Coach system. For some of you, your greatest wish is to turn email management over to your secretary, like yesterday. But wait! Before you do that you must first reduce the amount of email you currently receive by taming your senders’ worst instincts and stemming the incoming tide. Here’s how…

Step 1: Retrain By Redirecting

Have polite, respectful, direct conversations with those staff members, colleagues and parents who habitually send you unnecessary email and tell them “Please don’t send me emails about X. I don’t handle X. On our team (NAME) handles X. Send your emails regarding X to (NAME). You’ll receive more informed, faster responses from (NAME) than me.” If senders continue to CC/CYA you on emails unrelated to your job, exercise your DELETE finger muscles with abandon.

Step 2: Define For Senders Your Actual Job

Like the examples we have listed at the Graduate Portal, deploy an auto-email reply that sets proper communication expectations for your senders and clearly stipulates that handling email is not your priority – that you spend most of your time out in classrooms, (which is where you are right now), not at your desk reading and responding to email. Your auto-reply message should also designate your secretary as your “first responder” for all requests for information, input or your time.

Step 3: Don’t Answer Staff Email with Another Email

Instead, print staff’s emails and address their messages in-person when you’re out on Coaching Days. When staff members ask if you’ve read their email, respond confidently with “No, but I have it here. What does it say?” Your presence and question reinforce the notion that you prefer not to do business over email – that you put a much higher value on being face-to-face. Then notice how much time you save by engaging in-person, versus back and forth over email.

Step 4: Educate Parents at Every Opportunity

Anytime you can talk to parents in-person tell them “The best way to reach me is to email my secretary. My secretary previews all incoming messages to my office, then sorts and addresses the myriad of requests I receive every day. Concerned about privacy? For sure don’t use email. Instead, contact my secretary to schedule a meeting or phone call with me.”

Step 5: Get Out of Your Office

If it comes down to sitting at your desk, reading and responding to email, or being out in your team’s environment, BE OUT. Reading and responding to email as a management strategy is way less effective and much more time consuming than talking to people in the flesh. The more you’re out, the easier the job gets. If you’re waiting for the email deluge to subside before you leave your office, you’ve got it backwards. BE where the work is happening, regularly and consistently, and the amount of incoming email will subside.