If you struggle to find time to get past email to your real work after a holiday, you’re not alone. People at all levels experience similar issues.
One of the challenges with email is that replies can take a while to draft, meanwhile more email comes in as you’re drafting them – resulting in continuous inbox overflow for those who receive a lot of it.
You can do something about it.
For a longer term solution, have a look at our new Get Your Inbox to Zero online course, but for starters, try this suggestion from Five Sentences: treat all email responses like SMS text messages, using a set number of letters per response. Since it’s too hard to count letters, count sentences instead.
They say “five.sentenc.es is a personal policy that all email responses regardless of recipient or subject will be five sentences or less. It’s that simple.”
Putting in place a few simple strategies like this will save time, reduce stress and increase your focus.
By doing something different and learning new ways to manage email and practising new behaviours, you can change how you feel, and what you believe, about your work.
You never know, you might look forward to coming back to work after a holiday!
These productivity tips come from our new Working Smarter programme – if you can find the time and the headspace to do it, it is a brilliant way to change your mindset and learn practical ways to be more productive.
It will also help your team feel more in control and more motivated to step up and take things on – a common complaint from managers before taking the programme.
If you’d like to make work better try the manager programme first for yourself, (and if you think it’s good, talk to us about options for making it available to your colleagues).