Articles

Email and a Hamster Revolution

Jana M. Kemp

Email overwhelms us daily. Junk email, jokes, family stories, and legitimate business email flood our inboxes every day, overnight and through our weekends. Authors Mike Song, Vicki Halsey, and Tim Burress promise an end to the hamster-like revolutions of processing email.

“The Hamster Revolution: How to Manage Your Email Before it Manages You” is the title of their book. The authors’ premise is that we can “stop info-glut” and reclaim our lives. They also suggest that if you send and receive 40 emails a day that amounts to 9,600 emails a year and 40 days handling those emails. By reducing your email by 20% they believe that you’ll find 8 days to spend on other activities.

Using a story-approach similar to “Who Moved My Cheese?,” the authors unravel the tale of Harold the Hamster who is in search of methods for regaining control of the communication technologies that are running his life – leaving him on the proverbial hamster wheel of being stuck in one place and losing time all the while.

Song, Halsey and Burress present four strategies for improved email handling. First, reduce your email volume. For the second strategy “improve your email quality,” the authors’ ABC hints are very actionable. Third, coach others to send you more actionable email (yes, in chapter seven the authors provide details and models for doing this). For instance, the Coaching Tools summarized on page 54 are great reminders for improving our own emails and for coaching others to improve theirs.

And the one I like the most, strategy four: File and Find Info Fast with COTA®. COTA is the authors’ system for archiving and then retrieving the information we don’t end up deleting. The acronym stands for Clients, Outcomes, Teams and Administration which are suggested as the four main folders for storing emails. The beauty of this foursome is that you can find things more easily and so can others when they need to assist you when you’re not in the office. Improved email handling should lead to greater productivity for everyone in the office.

Check out this book for email improvement strategies. Ultimately, we each need to find a system that works for us and that makes us more productive rather than leaving us stuck on a hamster wheel spinning without any results.

Action Item: Manage your email so you can reclaim your time and your life.

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Reprint Permission: The author is willing to grant reprint permissions. Please contact Jana Kemp: jana@janakemp.com or call 208-367-1701.