In today’s digital era, emails have become part and parcel of our working day and enable us to communicate with colleagues and clients quickly and efficiently. However, for many paraplanners they can serve as an unwelcome distraction during busy times.
Our recent Professional Paraplanner Parameters survey found that 64% of paraplanners believe email sucks away their time during the working day, double the 31% who disagreed.
There was a general consensus that there is pressure to reply to emails immediately, with paraplanners noting that one email can take up a lot of time trying to find the right person or solution.
One paraplanner told Professional Paraplanner: “It’s often easy to get distracted by an incoming email and divert or reprioritise it while in the middle of another task.”
Another said that people often use email as a form of instant messaging and expect an “immediate response” forcing paraplanners to spend their days responding to messages rather than getting bigger and more important tasks completed.
To overcome this issue, many paraplanners said they create chunks of email free time to concentrate on the tasks at hand, while one paraplanner said they switch off notifications and set themselves certain times to check their inbox.
Firms are also having to contend with general emails that are “sent to all”.
One said: “I am bombarded with lots of unnecessary emails daily which are actually for administrators and makes it hard to concentrate on technical aspects of my role.”
To combat this, one paraplanner said their firm has a dedicated paraplanner mailbox to stop the duplication of work requests.
However, others said that emails act as a necessary evil, enabling paraplanners to stay in contact with clients, while one paraplanner said emails act as a good audit trail for the advice process.
PP editor Rob Kingsbury offers some practical suggestions for dealing with email overload
What’s the one thing you need to get done today? I’ll guarantee it’s not answer emails.
As you can imagine, my inbox fills up on daily basis, not least with press releases from around the industry. I could quite easily spend all my time each day stuck in my email inbox. So I’ve developed some techniques to help me deal with the daily email deluge.
We all work in different ways and in different environments so these won’t all work for everyone, but I hope you can find ways to adapt them to your working day and they help in some way.
• Schedule a set time(s) in the day to deal with emails.
We can often view emails as immediate tasks needing immediate answers. But how many are really that time sensitive? Often when we feel we have to respond to emails asap, we are letting others’ priorities subvert our own.
Scheduling when to tackle emails to set times in the day can take a while to get used to but once the discipline is installed you’ll be surprised how quickly you can retrain your brain not to constantly check email – which often we do subconsciously – also, how much this can help take emails out of the stress equation.
Studies into people’s productivity when they used this technique found that they answered the same amount of emails as when they responded throughout the day, they just did it faster.
You’ll have to set realistic times. Look at when you work best on report writing, for example, and avoid emails in that period of time. It will be a process of trial and error but it can result in real benefits to productivity, time saved and stress levels.
• Don’t give in to notifications
Hopefully no-one has their computer set up to ping every time an email comes in (right?). But turning off the notification which keeps a tally on screen of how many unread emails are sitting in your inbox can stop you checking emails and again, helps reduce stress.
• Set up dedicated inboxes
I have set up dedicated inboxes to filter my emails into clear work streams. So, I have a VIP inbox, for people whose emails I know I will want to read and reply to first, and an unsubscribe inbox, for all emails that contain the word ‘unsubscribe’. This helps me sort the wheat from the chaff. It means my main inbox isn’t stuffed with a random range of emails and makes prioritising which emails I tackle first far easier.
• Communicate your schedule
If you let people know when you will check you emails you set their expectation as to when they might receive a reply. You can do this informally or by setting up an out-of-office message that informs people at what time you check your emails. If there is something urgent, they can then text or phone. It can be easier to ping an email than to pick up the phone, so this can act as a nature filter of what is and isn’t ‘urgent’.
• Set a time in which you will respond to emails
As well as scheduling when you’ll tackle your emails, establish a set timeframe which you will dedicate to answering emails. I find half-an-hour works well. It also helps focus attention on the emails which actually need a response. When scheduling email time, remember also to leave space at the end of the day for you to finish up your work.
• Empty your inbox at the end of the week
This can be a difficult one to achieve – but not impossible. Use of a dedicated mailbox for emails which need to be to carried over to the next week is the way I tackle this. And the more you empty your inbox every week, the less you find you do need to carry over. You do need to be bit ruthless with this but it does help focus on which emails you truly need to tackle. And again, having an empty inbox to start the week helps prioritise emails as they come in.
