Many of us filter emails. A common technique is to automatically stream newsletters and similar information to a Read Later folder, allowing us to give them attention when we’re ready. We call it filtering, but Aytekin Tank, chief executive officer of online form builder Jotform, more aptly calls it automating: We have created a system that doesn’t require our attention when each e-mail comes in. For him, filtering emails is just a first step in automating elements of our work life to be more efficient.
It requires developing systems, breaking activities into steps to understand what parts might be automated. That effectively creates a helpful checklist of steps for tasks such as sending out a monthly financial report or setting up a team meeting so that you don’t each time have to rethink what comes next. And it requires exploring technological aides that can assist.
He stresses automation won’t magically whittle your workload down to four hours a day. But it can relieve you of some of the busywork burden to focus on more important matters. And he argues that you can automate more than you realize, even some complicated tasks, if you challenge yourself and give yourself time – it won’t happen overnight.
Start by identifying how much of your day is gobbled up by busywork. Keep track, ideally for a few days, to see where your time actually goes. This will also sensitize you to workflows – the interconnected steps that can be part of even the seemingly simplest tasks. There’s a workflow involved in brushing your teeth and there is a workflow embedded into replying to most emails. Do you have the data to reply? Is a decision required? What other options exist?
“Understanding the workflows that underpin each task is like unlocking your own prison door. Suddenly you can see why ‘I’ll just answer this e-mail’ can devolve into 90 minutes of text messages and file searching. It’s not that we’re easily distracted; the task itself was laden with steps,” Mr. Tank writes in Automate your Busywork.
A good automation first step might be creating quick e-mail templates for standard responses to regular questions you receive from colleagues or clients. You want to save them in your e-mail program with easy to recognize labels. That can be done most simply by keeping them in your drafts folder but you can also store them in templates and find them. I’ve used Quick Phrase from TypingMaster for years.
He offers an example of an HR specialist who near the end of each quarter must remind the company’s team leads to submit performance reviews. Here a workflow should be developed, starting with a trigger, in this case the first days of March, June, September and December. Then the steps of reminder emails and secondary reminders and alert emails to others in the process must occur as the reviews flow in. Some of the emails the specialist sent, of course, can be standardized and saved as templates.
Mr. Tank singles out saving all the attachments you receive in a separate place as a possibility for automation, so that you don’t have to delve into a slew of folders later to find them. This can be done with Microsoft Power Automate in Outlook but IFTTT and Zapier can handle it on other platforms. Or you can try automating meeting notes by automatically recording and converting speech into written text and saving it to your platform of choice using tools like Otter.ai, Gong.io and Rev.
It requires extra work initially and learning how to use some new tools. But you probably had to learn some tricks to stream those newsletters into a separate folder and it paid off over the long term.
Quick hits
- If you woke up three years from now and were living your ideal life, what were the three things you did to get you there, asks entrepreneur Sahil Bloom? He urges you to be specific: What positive systems did you create? What bad habits did you eliminate? What positive environments did you enter? Who did you create distance from?
- Communications coach JD Schramm recommends when making a presentation, writing down a single compelling quote related to your topic on an index card that will fit into your pocket and on a second card your outline and main message. If at any point you feel lost, simply say “one quote I appreciate on this topic is from…” and read the quote while also glancing at the outline to regain your footing.
- To get to the next level you need to add more steps to your ladder, observes marketing consultant Roy H. Williams. That means doing things you have never done before, after examining the beliefs that limit you.
- If you are stuck in a place or situation you hate, see what you can do for others suggests writer Mari Andrew.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.