The HBR Blog Network is where we go to gain insights from our business elite. Their guest bloggers can be counted on to dispense advice on macro-level issues–Eurozone or other monetary crisis–as well as helpful tips on more granular concerns, such as the do’s-and-don’ts of a successful job campaign. In this latter category, they’ve recently offered a post on improving executive email productivity.
Peter Bergman, a “strategic advisor to CEOs”, gave his C-level readers a procedure that will quickly get them through their inbox chores.
Perhaps you may be following his method already? It is as follows:
Give yourself a half-hour to: (1) write and send new emails, (2) delete emails you don’t need, (3) respond to emails that are worthy of a response, (4) save to folders everything else, and (5) review emails in your saved folders.
This reminds me, that in just about every company I’ve worked at, with the exception of a few tech ones, the C-level crew and their immediate charges have been profoundly computer illiterate. They may know the part number of every product, have memorized their financial spreadsheets for the last 12 quarters, and can recite the pitch for their 60-page company roadmap Powerpoint without taking a breath.
But for CxOs, email, word processing, and that thing called Google are low-level skills that are not worthy of their time.