Managing E-mail
E-mail is likely you're biggest time drain, more invasive even than
your telephone. I know I'd rather answer an e-mail anytime than do real
work that I am supposed to be doing. And, with Outlook and other e-mail
programs informing you every time a new e-mail comes in, you are drawn
to check out each and every one.
Peggy Duncan, an Atlanta personal productivity expert who has written
five books about time management, including Conquering Email Overload,
suggests managing e-mail the same way you're supposed to manage your
telephone: Don't answer it. Instead, collect all your messages once or
twice a day and manage them all at once. You thus manage your time
rather than letting the ring of the telephone manage you. With e-mail,
a similar tack can be taken. Instead of looking at your e-mails as they
come in, leave time in the middle and at the end of the day to manage
e-mail.
Microsoft Outlook by default tells you whenever you receive a new
e-mail. But you can change your setting to eliminate this distraction.
To do so, go to the Tools menu in Outlook and choose Options. Then,
click on the Preferences tab. From there, choose Email Options and then
choose Advanced Email Options. Uncheck the Play A Sound box and you
will no longer hear the little Outlook chime we're all so familiar
with, and uncheck the Show An Envelope box to eliminate the pop ups
informing you each time an e-mail comes in. Finally, uncheck Display a
New Mail Desktop Alter. You've just eliminated a major distraction. For
an e-mail addict like me, that's big.
Web Waste
Another distraction: surfing the Web. It's pretty easy to click on a link in an e-mail or on a Web site that you're working and be transported to something related but unimportant. "You get sucked into looking at something on the Web that may be interesting but that will not earn you money," says Currie. And then there is time wasted surfing the Web for personal reasons.
The 2006 Web@Work employee survey conducted by Harris Interactive revealed that 65% of men who access the Internet from work admitted to accessing nonwork-related Web sites during work hours, versus 58% of women. Men admitted to spending 2.3 hours per week on nonwork-related Web sites, while women admitted to spending 1.5 hours per week on nonwork-related sites. And this is what people admit to.
If you have ten employees who are paid an average of $25 an hour,
eliminating personal Web surfing would save you $25,000 a year. It's
reasonable to assume that reducing Web surfing by employees looking at
work-related sites that will not earn your firm any money could save
you more.
If you run a Qlockwork report and see that you are spending two hours a day surfing the Web, you know you have a problem.
Advanced Features
I never come near utilizing the full power of most software programs
because I'd have to spend an hour or two reading the documentation and
learning the program, and I suspect you're probably the same. So I
cheated and, rather than read the documentation, I asked Currie about
some of the other clever ways to use the program.
In addition to displaying your activities in a calendar, Qlockwork
provides an Activities Report that lists all of your activities for any
period you specify. It generates the report as an HTML e-mail that you
can send and as an Excel spreadsheet. Your staff can thus e-mail their
activities for a day or an entire week, and it takes just seconds to
do.
If you are working on a project, you can create a report to monitor the
time it takes you to do that project. You do this by displaying an
Activity List and then hitting Control and clicking on the activities
you wish to include in that project. Qlockwork uses your selected
activities to generate a keyword list. So if you want to collect all of
the documents and work you did for John Smith, you would select
activities from a list and Qlockwork would use that to find all of the
activities you have done for John Smith. You can thus create a report
reflecting how much time you spent on each client.
Few Problems
Outlook is a huge program and since there are so many Outlook add-ons,
Qlockwork may not run smoothly for all users. Since I was testing other
new Outlook programs, for instance, I had to reinstall Qlockwork to get
it to run correctly after installing another add-on program. But since
then Qlockwork has been stable and has given me no other problems, and
it is not buggy.
Qlockwork prevents you from wasting time on your computer when you
should be making money. It's worth the $50 licensing fee, but you can
see for yourself by downloading a 30-day trial at www.qlockwork.com.
The program already succeeded in making me more focused. Examining the
Qlockwork report made me realize how much time I am spending answering
e-mails and I turned off my e-mail notifications-all the chimes and
pop-ups are gone. And guess what? I wrote this column in significantly
less time than usual!
Andrew Gluck, a longtime writer and journalist, is CEO of Advisor
Products Inc., a Westbury, N.Y., marketing company serving 1,500
advisory firms.