When did answering email become my job?
January 15th, 2013 GTD Times Team - Staff ContributorsCategories | David Allen | Getting Things Done | Inspiration | Interviews
Question: At what point did answering email become my job?
David Allen’s answer: Well, at what point did answering anything—your mail, having conversations in your hallway—become your job? It’s all your job. You just have to decide what your work is. As the late, great Peter Drucker said, that’s your biggest job, to define what your work is.
So how do you define what your work is, and therefore should you be doing that? The good news about this overwhelm is that it’s forcing people to make executive decisions that they never felt like they had to make before. “I need to do everything that comes my way.” No, you can’t anymore, sorry. You are going to have to do triage. That means you are going to have to have a conversation with your boss. You are going to have to show up with a list of everything he or she has given you and have a conversation. “Gee, thanks for these new things, can we talk? Because I am not going to be able to do them all.” It’s forcing those kinds of conversations.
That’s why people have this attraction/repulsion to GTD. It ain’t lightweight stuff. If you are really going to work this, that’s what’s going to start to show up.
Excerpted from David’s interview with Xconomy.com.
Mr. Allen,
I agree with your answer that answering e-mail is like having a conversation in the hallway, and that it’s all our jobs. However, I think there might be a more subtle point that is being overlooked. Yes, answering e-mail is our job, but our jobs are not answering e-mail. I know people who act as if promptly answering e-mail is at least the most important part of their job if not the entirety of their job. If I send them an e-mail, I can count on a response within a few minutes, or not at all. I know that many people work with their desktop alerts turned on, and they feel compelled and obligated to read every e-mail as soon as they are notified by the ding and popup window that notifies them of each new arrival in their inbox.
I could treat that as their issue and no concern of mine or anyone else’s, but it does affect the rest of in two ways. First, people who allow themselves to be interrupted and distracted by every e-mail that comes their way often struggle to complete the other work that is part (and probably the most important part) of their jobs. So if we are relying on them to get that work done in a timely manner, or even done anytime at all, we have a problem. Secondly, those folks often expect everyone else to be poised at their PC ready answer every e-mail that comes their way. So they get impatient or angry with those of us who carve out time to do other work involved in our jobs instead of acting as if answering e-mail is the totality of our jobs.
Please excuse me if I’m sounding self-righteous about this, because I too have a long way to go to better handle e-mail efficiently and effectively. I can’t remember the exact source, but it was through a GTD publication or discussion group that I learned the importance of turning of desktop alerts for e-mail. That helped me tremendously. However, I’m still learning how to avoid letting the arrival of e-mail dictate my daily activities, because to often in a stressful day, it’s easier to let the random arrival of e-mail make my decision of what to do next than it is to think about it and make the better decision.