Two weeks ago, I had the privilege to speak at one of the premier IT industry events in Orlando, FL. One of the sessions was titled SOPs for your SOPs and really covered two topics. The first was how to write great SOPs and the second focused on building a solid culture around continual process improvement. While I tend to focus heavily on finding our flaws and continuously seeking to improve, I can tend to forget to see what we do well. It was rewarding and an honor to share with the attendees what we have learned, often, from our own mistakes. In this blog, I’m going to focus on things that we have found are critical to writing great SOPs.

In the last post, I talked about how to better manage the flow of e-mails through your Inbox and how to control the time suck of handling e-mail. Out of that, several people asked for some tips on handling e-mail and reducing the total volume of e-mail in their inbox. This blog post is focused on strategies and approaches I’ve found effective.

E-mail is a wonderfully wicked mistress of sorts. The efficiency with which you can communicate certain concepts, without the invasiveness of things like phone calls and instant messages, is amazing. However, e-mail has also become a bit of a behemoth to manage with the overall volume of legitimate e-mail along with spam, being cc’d on threads that have no relation to you and much more. The principles of time management apply to all areas of our life but, for many, e-mail is a great place to apply these as we usually handle a higher volume of information in our e-mail than anywhere else. If we can figure out how to be organized and effectively manage our time with e-mail, I have found that the principles apply in other areas as well.