ABOUT YOUR BIZ

Small business owners are busier than most people on earth, and that's why Your Biz is here. For seasoned business owners and budding entrepreneurs alike, we'll tackle it all - health care, franchising, taxes, the latest gadgets and even how to balance work and life. Yes, it's possible, even when you're your own boss.

Eve Tahmincioglu

Primary author Eve Tahmincioglu has been covering small business and entrepreneurship for more than a decade. She regularly writes about small business issues for the New York Times and BusinessWeek's SmallBiz magazine. She also writes the Your Career column for MSNBC.com. She is the author of "From the Sandbox to the Corner Office."



Fighting e-mail overload

Posted: Tuesday, March 25, 2008 4:48 AM by Eve Tahmincioglu
Filed Under: , , , , , , ,

I’m feeling pretty lonely.

Lately I’ve noticed my e-mails are going unanswered for longer and longer periods of time.

I check my e-mail every few seconds, and I can’t imagine not getting back to people in a flash.

But maybe I’ve bought into this crazy way of life.

Maybe I should take a page from the owner of a tea lounge in San Francisco who has taken a machete to e-mail.

I wrote a story last  week about how some people feel overloaded thanks to our high-tech, 24-7 information society, and it seems there’s also a growing backlash against the info overload among entrepreneurs.

Last week, I received an e-mail from Jesse Jacobs, owner of the Samovar Tea Lounge, and when I replied this was the automatic response I got back:

“In an effort to focus on the tea business more, and e-mail less, I will be responding to e-mail on Monday and Thursday at 1pm. If you need an immediate response please don't hesitate to call me.”

Call? Is this guy serious? Who has time for that?

OK, 1 p.m. came and went but no e-mail. I was sort of angry until I realized he was on West Coast time. I’d have to wait until 4 p.m. EST to get my answer and that would throw a wrench in my work.

Reluctantly, I went old school and called the guy.

“What’s up with this e-mail bashing?” I asked.

“It’s an inefficient tool,” he says. “When you’re e-mailing back and forth it’s easy to feel like your doing a lot but at the end of the day it doesn’t help you accomplish your goals.”

The way he sees it, e-mail was actually hampering his creativity and is keeping him from growing his business, which now includes two locations, 50 employees, and an e-commerce site. He has plans to grow his online offerings and open stores in other cities, but the “constant bombardment of e-mail” was robbing him of precious time. “I have no budget to hire a personal assistant.”

So, his New Years resolution was to cut back on his e-mail “affliction” as he calls it.

“I’m stepping out of this cultural vortex of the faster you respond the faster you get a response,’” he explains.

About this time I was wondering if I had an affliction, so I questioned him more, like an alcoholic who suddenly wonders if she’s drinking too much.

“What have been the negatives?” I asked, sure he’d tell me some horror story about pissing off a customer.

“Nothing,” he says. “Nothing,” I retort. “Nothing,” he adds.

“I’m not a Luddite,” says Jacobs, who used to work in high tech. “We use technology everywhere we can. I even just started a blog.”

His mission was simply to pull the plug on the e-mail avalanche that was keeping him from focusing on what’s important, growing his business.

I’m not sure he can distance himself too much from the Luddites. Turns out he recently bought a 1956 Underwood typewriter and has been forcing his staff to take meeting notes on the dinosaur.

Instead of having a big volume of meeting notes because everyone was typing away on their laptops, they now share that one typewriter and end up with four or five key points.

What’s next, carbon copies?

MAIN PAGE

Email this EMAIL THIS

Comments

Its a tough to think premail, for one it does drive my boss crazy a good number of times, but I think its a beast that has become like a cancer cell no one can get rid of. Let me add as something of a solution as all of us can not completely get away from the email, find a time at home when home can be unplugged, No Email, No Phone, No PDA, No Cable, No internet. It's tough at first but its good time spent on the things that mean most in life, un rushed compeltely there, no matter how good you are at multi tasking familes don't liked to be shared, and for us single people rest when you can because its worth it in the long run.

Cheerio thanks for the idea

Thames, Charlotte, NC (Sent Tuesday, March 25, 2008 2:19 PM)

Hey Eve, the professional writer... I'm sure when you spoke to him on the telephone, he didn't say...
“When you’re e-mailing back and forth it’s easy to feel like your doing a lot but at the end of the day it doesn’t help you accomplish your goals.”
...  
I bet he REALLY said.... “When you’re e-mailing back and forth it’s easy to feel like you’re doing a lot but at the end of the day it doesn’t help you accomplish your goals.”
"?
How can you spell the first contraction correctly and screw up the second one?

Mark B, Santa Ana, CA (Sent Tuesday, March 25, 2008 8:17 PM)

This works for him because he owns the business and it's the type of business that can get away with not checking email regularly. In the real world though...email is not the problem, but rather how you manage it. First, he was probably getting a lot of spam because his live (clickable) email address is on his Website. Beyond that, the key to email management is to get organized so you can find answers quickly, use the best email client (Outlook) and learn how to use it, and have good email habits. All this will give him more time during the day to answer email. If he doesn't want to hire an assistant, he could use a service such as logmein.com and have someone he trusts check email on his computer (if he doesn't use Webmail). There is always a way to fix a problem when people are willing to get to the root cause.

Peggy Duncan (Sent Tuesday, March 25, 2008 10:50 PM)

Hi Peggy--
This is Jesse from Samovar Tea Lounge, and I just wanted to thank you for commenting about Eve's article. To respond to you about my email management...

I am a mac user and use the native "mail" program. Although I wouldn't call myself a power user, I have rules set up to keep my inbox down to just 40-50 messages a day, and, with those filters, I get less than 10% spam, and, also get all mail dropped into my contacts' folders for me to read at my convenience.

Still, the majority of emails I get is from vendors, customers, employees, and potential investors. I set expectations straight by offering an autoresponder that directs those requests to the appropriate staff who can respond to the message. This option only became available of course after I met with them and asked them to take on more responsibility, ie, delegating my work load to them.

And, in the event of an emergency (like a broken water heater, an emergency inspection from a health inspector, a supplier crisis, etc), I always offer my personal phone number. So far, I have only received 5 calls since January 1. Everyone else has communicated with me without a hitch, when I respond on monday or thursday.

Thanks for reading,

jesse jacobs, san francisco, ca (Sent Sunday, April 13, 2008 1:52 AM)



SEND A COMMENT

PLEASE READ: All comments must be approved before appearing in the thread; time and space constraints prevent all comments from appearing. We will only approve comments that are directly related to the blog, use appropriate language and are not attacking the comments of others.

Message (please, no HTML tags. Web addresses will be hyperlinked):

Your name, city and state (John Doe, Seattle, Wash.): 

 Your e-mail address (jdoe@msnbc.com):

Your website (it's okay if you don't have one):

Remember me? (We'll keep it private)