I love reading good prose, particularly a good narrative. Sometimes prose is called for in an email — to tell a story, explain your reasoning, provide some depth regarding your feelings on a topic, etc. Some people prefer the phone or face-to-face for those things, but in many situations, email is sufficient.

But many of the emails we send and receive every day aren’t this kind of content. They are instead heavily task-oriented — all about coordinating our work with other people. For these kind of emails, straight prose is generally a much less effective form of communication.

Over the years, as I’ve worked with people on communicating more effectively via email, I’ve observed that when people include more than one topic (even just two) in an email, all too often the recipient only replies to one of the topics. Then the sender has to reply back asking again about the overlooked issues.

Most people scan their email — they don’t read it closely. As a result, if there are action items, or items for which a specific response is expected from the other person, that needs to be clearly communicated in the email in a way that will still be effective knowing the recipient will likely just scan the email.

The solution? Numbered lists.

List each item that requires response or action with a number in front of it. You can then write a whole paragraph if you need to, but the numbered list accomplishes a couple of things:

1. Recipients are clearer as to what’s expected of them in terms of actions and responses. They can’t claim that it was buried in the email if it was specifically enumerated.
2. Recipients are less likely to skip an item when they respond. With the numbers, it’s easier to check for completeness of our response. If there are five items in the email, there should be five items in your response. I don’t claim this to be scientific — I just know it works.
3. If they skip an item, it’s easier to communicate back to them about it.  “Thanks for your response, but what about item #2?” No retyping — just a single simple question.

A few tips:

1. Numbers work better than bullets. I don’t have quantitative data on this, but I can tell you that both for myself and with my clients, I first tried using bulleted lists, and that was a noticeable improvement over prose, but people still tended to skip items. But with numbered lists, skipped items in responses fall to almost zero. Apparently, without the numbers, our brain kind of loses place. Also, you lose advantage #3 above.
2. Bolding the start of each item helps. Whether it’s complete sentences or just a phrase as a pseudo-header, bold-facing the beginning of each item improves scannability.
3. Two items constitutes a list. How often have you sent an email with two questions for the other person and they only reply to one of them? It happens, and numbering them helps prevent it.
4. One list item = one action item. It doesn’t do much good to create a list if each list item has two or three questions or separate actions. Break it down.

This clearly isn’t appropriate for every email, even those longer than a paragraph, but in the proper context, this has been a great tool for me and my clients in reducing email traffic and confusion. Try it for yourself and see.

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Ahh…completion!

You know the feeling. Inbox…empty. Weekly review…done. Deliverable…delivered. Project…complete. That slight rush as you say, “It is finished.”

This can be a great additional motivation in getting things done. One little completion “fix” after another and pretty soon you’re on a major productivity roll.

But there can be a dark side.

See, the act of completion feels so good that it can become an addiction — to the point that we very easily find ourselves finishing something — anything — that we can finish quickly, rather than diving into larger, more difficult tasks.

We all know the joy of picking low-hanging fruit. On the up side, at least it’s productive — at least it’s doing something to help us move forward.I don’t know about you, though, but I could probably spend an entire month knocking out a backlog of low-hanging fruit without doing anything on any of my major projects. While a month might be a bit much, in reality I frequently find myself spending several hours – even an entire day — finishing things that are productive, but not truly the most important thing I need to be doing.

But that’s not the worst of it. When it becomes downright destructive is at the point that you start feeding your addiction by finishing anything. A game of Sudoku. Another level in World of Warcraft. Random house cleaning. Watching the last episode of the Monk marathon you recorded two weeks ago. Replying to all your Twitter and Facebook messages.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of these activities, assuming they are truly at the top of your priority list. And yes, entertainment can be at the top of your list even when you have work to be done. Your brain needs a break in order to be at maximum productivity when you’re focused on work.

But the appeal of these things is in more than just their entertainment value. A big part of the appeal is the illusion that you’re actually accomplishing something — feeding that fix of getting things done, even if what you’re getting done isn’t at the top of your list.

So what’s the solution?

As with any habit or addiction, quitting cold turkey is difficult if not impossible. The best way to quit a bad habit is to replace it with a good one. It’s OK to be addicted to getting things done — just replace getting anything done with getting the right things done.

You don’t have to be perfect at it. In my own experience, I’ve found it just about impossible to leap directly from that completely wasteful time to maximum productivity. Just take one step up the ladder. If you find yourself doing something pointless just for a completion fix, start picking some low-hanging fruit instead. If you’re on a roll with low-hanging fruit and avoiding bigger tasks, choose just one. Pick the highest-priority task that you can get done in, say, an hour and do it.

No matter how good your system is, it’s still ultimately only as good as your ability to stick to it. If you find yourself having a hard time, this is one place to look. Watch yourself for a week and see if you may have an addiction to getting anything done, rather than getting the right things done.

Image: Missouri Bike Federation

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I read with interest Matthew Cornell’s piece on 10 GTD “holes” (and how to plug them). I was particularly interested in the section on simplified GTD, as that’s something I’ve practiced myself. I also empathized with many of the other points he made regarding implementation challenges. And I do agree that many people need to do some time use analysis, if nothing else as a personal wake-up call. [Read more →]

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You’ve heard the old saying, “It’s who you know,” and probably the modern variant on it, “It’s not who you know, it’s who knows you.” I’m here to tell you it’s not that, either. A big address book or an even bigger fan base is worth next to nothing unless those people will do one thing: take action on your behalf.

It’s not your network itself that has value for you, it’s your ability to call your network into action.

That’s a pretty broad concept. What does it mean in practical terms?

Let’s take a simple example: how many people do you know who would loan you a dollar? $10? $100? $1,000? As the dollar amount goes up, the number goes down, of course, not just based on the ability of the people to take that action, but their willingness to do so based on the strength of their relationship with you. Simply put, how well do they have to know you in order to take a particular action on your behalf?

That point is the “action threshold”.

If you build a “network” of thousands of “friends” or “connections”, the vast majority of them are going to be very weak relationships. Frankly, you’re lucky if they even recognize your name. How likely do you think they are to take action on your behalf? In fact, with more and more “noise” being generated in the social media world - Twitter, Friendfeed, etc. - it becomes more and more difficult to even get people to take the most trivial of actions, like replying to a message on Twitter or commenting on a blog post. How much more difficult is it to get people to do something of real value?

Given a limited amount of time to spend building relationships, the more people you try to meet and maintain relationships with, the weaker they will be, on average. I’m not suggesting you should build just a small, close circle of friends, but that you consider whether going for raw numbers is really the most effective use of your time. If a relationship isn’t actionable, how valuable is it, really?

The easiest way to build stronger relationships - the kind of relationships that get things done - is by taking some of those “above the threshold” actions for others yourself, by helping others get things done. Here are some ideas on ways to create real value for people via social media:

• Instead of leaving a dozen or so blog comments, write one guest blog post for a friend.
• Instead of leaving just an opinion on several questions on LinkedIn, spend an hour with the person who needs help with a spreadsheet (I did this one last Sunday).
• Instead of posting on Twitter about what you had for lunch, post a review of a new book or product of one of your associates.
• Instead of browsing a couple of forums, spend half an hour calling one of your contacts and discussing with them.
• Instead of inviting a dozen more people to your network on LinkedIn, write a recommendation for someone already in it.

Social media is a powerful tool for building your network, and a powerful network can help you get all kinds of thing done in your business and your life. But don’t make the mistake of confusing activity with progress. Invest your time in relationships in a way that will yield real returns, not just the illusion of results.

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Nutshell Mail has a great piece on taking control of that burgeoning inbox. If you’ve ever arrived at your office and been faced with over a hundred new messages, this post is a must read… Two GTD Times contributors, Scott Allen and Timothy Ferriss offer some best-practices, techniques and simple processes that will put you back in the drivers seat and keep that email beast under control.

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