Oh, Bother

I just did the math. During the workday, I get an email every 10 minutes that matters to me. Those emails are links to news articles, file attachments, tasks, questions, reminders, alerts, and read receipts. I get calendar invitations to meetings, conference calls, webinars, lunches. I also get phone calls, voice messages, walk-ins, and snail mail. Every time I turn around, somebody wants me to do something or read something, so I've stopped turning around. In the old days, it was common for powerful executives like myself to have an assistant. That person would be the gatekeeper: he or she would open the mail, take the phone call, write the letter I would sign, handle my schedule, etc. Now, all but the top echelons in the biggest organizations must manage their own communication and schedule. The PDA or "virtual assistant" is more a nag than a help. It can be difficult to focus on the task at hand with all of these paralyzing distractions. As a result, I think more than a few of us are suffering from overload.

So we're missing that buffer layer that used to separate a manager from employers, employees, and customers. Short of paying a fat salary and sacrificing office space for a professional administrative assistant, what can we do about it? Here's where a combination of psychology, trust, email management, and SharePoint come into play.

First, the psychology. I understand that managers like to seem on top of things. Is getting an email that a file was uploaded really their job? The daily minutiae of a project should be handled by team members, not the manager. That includes acting as interpreter between the customer and the team. Managers should et them communicate directly and wait for the regular report. The team is reporting their activity, right?

That brings us to trust. If team members have to be watched all the time, it's time to get a different team. Managers should support the team, which includes giving them opportunities for both success and failure. OK, no one likes failure, but I've learned more from my failures than my successes. The trick is to fail in small ways and have a backup plan.

There are hundreds of experts on email management, and this blog is not supposed to be book-length, despite my best efforts. All I will say is that project emails are usually better off as content in a collaboration system. Discussion groups, wikis, blogs, lists, project calendars, and other features are often better containers of project information than email because different types of data are handled different ways. Email just puts stuff in the inbox, no matter what it is.

Last, but not least, is SharePoint. Chances are that most folks reading this blog already have it or something like it. Managers should show the project team how to use it specifically for collaboration and communication on the project before them. This could mean using announcements for team updates, a blog for reporting, and a project wiki to pool decisions made or lessons learned. Then it's time for the manager to set alerts. No phone calls, no emails, no endless conference calls. For long-term projects, I set my alerts to get a weekly email summary of activity. Shorter term, I like a daily summary. I don't want to see the 10 emails it took to decide on a background color; I just want to know if the client is happy. As a project nears completion, I will reset my alerts to "immediate" to make sure the rollout is going smoothly.

The key to combating information overload is getting only the information I need. Through a combination of back-to-basics management and SharePoint technology, I think I've tamed the beast for now.