Where in the world am I today?: North Vancouver, BC, Canada

I’ve been getting more emails related to my blog recently which is quite encouraging… It means that people are actually reading the content I continue to generate and not only that, but are actually asking me interesting questions and suggesting ideas for additional content… Today is an example of that. I had two recent-ish emails that lent themselves well to being put together into a single post, so here goes.

Bob Cates and I had an exchange in which we discussed the relative merits of doing business over the phone vs. doing business via email. My take on the situation was that I more often than not ignore my phone and try to do most of my business via email… I just prefer to be able to think out my responses and have a written document to go back to if I need to check details…

He countered with –

I find that often, email can take up way more time, and drag things out because

• you need to go back and forth some times a few times to clarify things
• some people take for ever to respond (to say nothing of even getting or reading their email, due to who knows why)
• people (clients) can ignore email
• on my mac mail, I can’t get a read receipt like in my old outlook (do you know if it’s possible?)

Although the benefits you mentioned ARE good, it can be easier to “connect” by phone.

Good points and I agree with all of them, but I think in the end it comes down to personal preference. Often when I’m away from home in a different time zone or unable to easily deal with whatever it takes to get through on a phone call connecting to wifi and sending a message that the receiver can open when ever they see fit just works more seamlessly for me. This may also seem weird, but although I really love technology, I never seemed to have been bitten by the whole cel phone thing – calling friends all the time, texting, being reachable 24/7… Something about that just never clicked for me… I tend to prefer to go the email route as it allows me to choose when I want to be in contact with the world and when I’d rather not… Just the way I’m wired I think…

And since we’re on the topic of email, I got this from my friend Jay Gilligan recently –

How you deal with emails? What I mean is, especially when I’m on the road (which is all the time these years, have to travel to pay the rent!), it takes me all my office time to just read the new emails coming in, let alone writing back and dealing with all the old ones!!! So usually I let it build up and then once a week I’ll take way too long to write everyone back (like I’m doing to you now!). Truly Remarkable Loon had a nice philosophy a few years ago when he said that he just straight away deletes everything that he won’t write back to right away. Like if he gets an email from a friend that’s nice to hear from… but he knows deep down that even it would be nice to write back, he doesn’t have the time so he doesn’t pretend to worry about it and throws it away. I think he has a very clean inbox!

The answer to this one for me is simple… I do my very best to clear out as many emails from my inbox as I can on a daily basis… I used to be prone to responding to every single email I got, but I’ve learned that some emails don’t actually require a response. For some bizarre reason I always felt like I needed to have the last word in any given email correspondence, but I’ve learned that actually I don’t. If a conversation has reached the end of it’s life after one or two messages I just stop responding. Some emails seem to demand a response, especially ones of a business nature, but others, (like much of the notifications I get from Facebook) can just be filled instantly into the ‘received/read’ bin and left at that. When I do get around to connecting to Facebook I can, with one foul swoop just go in and click all of the buttons at once for a full week or two and be done with it.

Learn to prioritize and respond to only those emails that require a time sensitive response. The rest can wait. Often I’ll get up in the morning, have a look at my inbox, deal with anything that can or must be dealt with quickly then spend the rest of the day letting the content of other emails percolate away in my brain so that when I do sit down to respond to them I’ve had a good couple of hours to determine exactly how much I actually want to write and how I want to write it. By doing this I seem to spend less time trying to figure out exactly what I want to say and get through the inbox two-step that much more quickly…

French scientist, Blaise Pascal once said –

“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

And there really is something to the idea of giving your head a bit of extra time to figure out how to say what you want to say in the most efficient way possible… Give yourself a couple of hours to process the information and your responses will come out more quickly.

Got an idea for content for this blog? Let me know I’m more than happen to share the contents of my brain with those that are interested.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 at 12:01 am and is filed under Technical Tuesdays, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.