Pastors - You Do Not Serve Your Email

Since Christian leaders, especially pastors, are often “wired” for serving others, it’s not really a surprise that online communication technologies can sometimes trick us, tempting us to serve them rather than serving us.

No matter which technologies you and your staff elect to use, from Google docs to Yammer, we can probably all agree, the most common and far-reaching culprit in our technological clutter is our out of control email.

Contrary to what many of our tech-savvy congregation members might think, it’s often pastors who have the least time to learn basic email processing techniques.  And to aggravate the condition, the more staff support, the more likely we may be to handing off the basics, creating a knowledge & training gap.  Pastors can easily end up as underdogs when it comes to out muscling the email avalanche.

Mastering your email is absolutely essential for freeing your time for other things.  Furthermore, several fundamental principles provide a simple way to get ahead of your inbox and stay “in control” of your email.

Whether you subscribe to Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero style or some other form of ordered system, you will never like your computer the way you could with your email lording over you.

Michael Hyatt, President & CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, has blogged extensively on email techniques on his blog From Where I Sit (see: Yes, You Can Stay on Top of Email).  He processes about 100 emails an hour and still has ample time to Twitter.  Think that’s not possible?

Check out some of his system (like not touching the mouse!)….

1. Empty your inbox everyday.
2. Don’t get bogged down, keep moving.
   • Do—take action on the task now. I follow David Allen’s two-minute rule. If I can do what is being requested in less than two minutes, I do it immediately. This gets stuff off your to-do list before it ever gets on it. This has the added advantage of making you look responsive.
   • Delegate—pass the task along to someone else. I’m not talking about “passing the buck.” But oftentimes someone else is better equipped to fulfill the sender’s request. Dawson Trotman once said, “I purposed never to do anything others could or would do when there was so much of importance to be done that others could or would not do.” In other words, try to focus on where you add value and offload everything else.
   • Defer—consciously decide you will do the task later. This only applies to asks you cannot complete in two minutes or less or can’t delegate to someone else. You can either add the task to your to-do list or schedule an appointment with yourself to complete it. Fortunately, in Entourage, I convert an email message to a task or an event (i.e., appointment) with a single keystroke.
   • Delete—determine if you might need the information later. If not, delete it. My own assumption is that if it’s really important, someone, somewhere else in the world, has a copy of it.
   • File—if you think you might need the information, file it. But do not create an elaborate set of file folders. This is the single most important piece of advice I can give you. Just file everything in one folder called “Processed Mail.” If it is more complicated than this, it will lead to procrastination. Trust me on this. You will have to decide, Should I file this under Tami because it is from her or under Max because it is about him? And then what happens if the email covers more than one subject? Do you make copies of the email and put one copy under each folder? Things can get complicated fast.Forget all of that. File your email in one folder and let your email or system software (e.g., “Spotlight”) find it when you need it. The search capabilities of almost every modern email program will enable you to put your hands on any message whenever it is necessary. It may take you a few minutes longer to find the message using this method, but this is offset by the hours you waste trying to figure out how to file your messages.
3. Use keyboard shortcuts and avoid the mouse.
4. Let email rules filter the low-priority stuff.

Like Michael, I also have a Bacn folder for email newsletters, receipts, and other automatically-generated reading material including almost every notice I get from Facebook!  “Spam” is unsolicited bulk email.  “Bacn” is solicited bulk email.  This simple trick (thank you Tony Steward) gives me control over incoming and thus saves me valuable processing steps (read: time).