別為電子郵件浪費時間
We’re drowning in email. Is it all because of spam and those CCs?
That’s a misconception. How long does it take for you to identify that an email isn’t important? If it’s spam, it takes a second. For a CC, you can usually tell in a couple of seconds.
What really slows you down is the email that matters. See if this sounds familiar. You have a screenful of mail. The first one is just informational. The second, informational. In the third email, there is something that someone is kind of asking you to do. And that’s what’s going to bog you down.
You spend a lot of time trying to figure out what the next step is. And then you say to yourself, If I move on to the next email and the next one, then I am going to forget about this, so I probably ought to do it now. But wait, if I do it now, I am not going to get through my email. And I know how I am. If I don’t do it now, it won’t get done. So you give that person a call, and that one email wastes 20 minutes. Now you have a meeting and you still have 36 emails to go.
When you see a requested action in an email, don’t do it immediately. It might be one of the least important things for you to do that day. Instead, immediately identify what the action is and put the email in a task folder. Change the title so that it states what you need to do, and put a due date on it and a priority level. You can do that in 15 or 20 seconds. Then you move right on to the next email. Now you’ll get through your to-do email remarkably fast. Drag all of your other emails into a process folder, so you now have an empty inbox.
The next thing you do is go to your task list and ask, What are the most important things I need to do today? That’s the stuff that would keep you from going home at the end of the day. Research has shown that if you can’t spend 5 or 10 minutes with a task, you aren’t going to get very far. Don’t let yourself get interrupted all the time. Check email less frequently than you do now.
Storage space is so cheap these days. If you aggressively throw out email, it takes time to decide what can be trashed. Time is precious, but disk space is not.
Vocabulary
drown[draUn] v.被淹沒
misconception[;mIsk6n`sEpS6n] n.誤解；錯誤的想法
bog[bAG] v.使動彈不得
due[dju] adj.到期的
priority[praI`Cr6tI] n.優先順序
remarkably[rI`mArk6blI] adv.非常
toss[tCs] v.扔；投擲
trash[tr8S] v.丟棄
別為電子郵件浪費時間
我們每個人幾乎快要被電子郵件淹沒了。難道都是垃圾郵件或是副本惹的禍嗎？
這是錯誤的想法。判斷一封信重不重要，需要花多少時間？如果確定是垃圾郵件，只需要1秒鐘。如果是副本，可能需要幾秒鐘的時間。
真的花時間的是重要的郵件。想想看你是否也有過以下的經驗。信箱裡有好幾封電子郵件。第1封是資訊性的內容，第2封也是。第3封則是某個人要求你做某件事情，這時候你停了下來。
你花了一些時間想下一步要怎麼做。你告訴自己：「如果繼續看其他的信，就可能會忘了這封信，所以應該先處理這封信。但是，等一下，如果現在就處理，就沒有辦法看完其他的信件。可是我也很清楚自己的習慣，如果現在不做，就永遠都不會去做。」所以你打電話給寄信的那個人，結果這封信浪費了20分鐘。現在你得去開會，但是還有36封電子郵件要看。
當你看到信件中要求你做某件事，不要馬上去做，因為這件事可能是當天最不重要的。相反地，你應該立即判斷到底是什麼樣的事情，然後把這封信放入待辦事項檔案夾裡。修改郵件主旨，寫上你需要完成什麼工作，然後註明完成的時間以及重要性的高低。以上這些動作只需要15到20秒，然後繼續處理其他信件。快速看完所有信件之後，將剩下的電子郵件全部放進流程檔案夾中，這樣你的收件夾就可以清空了。