The Bane of Our Workday -E-mail

By Tim Kolacz

We all have had an account or two, or three. We’ve used Gmail, Yahoo and corporate e-mail. I use one for work, one for gaming websites, and one for other websites. I get 25, 50, 100 emails a day. What’s the point?

In the olden days, you know them, the 90’s; we did things differently. We wrote letters. We called people on the phone. We actually talked to people in line at the bank. Now with everyone having a smart phone, no one talks to each other anymore. It’s the “send me an email with your information and I’ll delete you later” era. What has happened to us?

The problem is we all use E-mail incorrectly.

E-mail was designed to connect a group of people to another group of people. It was designed to share documents in a timely manner so that they could be edited and then returned without re-writing the document. This was very novel and worked very well. Then more people got them and you could be more productive across multiple desktops and then across multiple locations. It was great.

Then, the King of Outer Southern Mongolia got an e-mail address and he wanted to send you a million dollars. Then the Internet took off and we signed up for everything using our e-mail. This worked out great until the first place you signed up for sold your e-mail to 50 other websites that you didn’t sign up for. That’s when e-mail took a terrible turn for the worse.

Now, in your corporate e-mail, you have a spam filter, which collects about 10 e-mails a day. YahooMail also has a junk folder where 15 to 20 or so emails are collected a day. So just between those two accounts, there are 25 plus e-mails that you don’t want and still need to delete on a frequent basis.

So, now you are unproductive for between an hour to two hours a week filtering through the spam box looking for that one e-mail that actually means something to you, moving it to the inbox and then responding to it. You just hope that it won’t end up in your spam-box again when they reply. Talk about unproductive.

Talk, hmmm, interesting word there. Talk. Talk to your colleagues. Talk to your clients. Talk to your prospects. Talk. About 20 years ago, there was an article in a magazine called Yahoo! Life. It was an awesome magazine and it had an article called “Why Japanese Teenage Girls Rule The World”. Cell phones had just taken off and when they talked to teenage girls in Tokyo they said all the things they could do with their phone. Number 14 was actually talking to someone on it.

Talking is a lost art and you need to rekindle it. Pick up the phone, that black box thing on your desk with the numbered buttons, and starting pushing them. This way your relationship with the person on the other end is enhanced. You learn a lot about them on the phone. Voice inflection, wants, needs, desires for them for the day, week, and life.

After your conversation, then you can send a very specific e-mail detailing what you talked about. That message will find them opening it, studying what was sent and then responding to your call to action. You can be productive on e-mail, instead of just deleting it.

Try it. Call me. Unless I’m driving, I’m going to answer.

Tim Kolacz is an Account Executive with HUB international Insurance Services and can be reached at (951) 779-8730 or [email protected].