I once had a boss that sent me an email asking me to set up a meeting with him.  His office was twenty feet away.  Lots of passive aggressive thoughts went through my brain before I realized that in a single stroke, he had embodied the two biggest black holes of personal productivity in contemporary business; emails and meetings.

No one is rewarded for the number of emails they read.  Yet we feel obligated to read them at all hours of the day or night.  Somehow we must feel our national productivity goes up when we read and answer emails.  This is especially true when Marketing sends emails to Sales requesting 29 things from them.  Don’t do this.  Remember the average sales person only spends 8 to 10 hours a week in real contact with prospects and clients.  Do you really want them reading your emails?

The problem with email is that it can be disruptive.  For those with the compulsive addiction to send emails or answer them immediately, it’s not helping.  It’s OK to send fewer emails or to answer them two or three times a day.  While we pride ourselves on multi-tasking, studies show that multi-tasking doesn’t produce more results, and that in fact, as humans, we are really poor at it.  If you disagree, please just try driving and texting.

The same goes for meetings.  Ask anyone where they go to get something done.  Rarely will you hear that they go to work.  You might hear answers like a coffee shop, or my office or on a plane.  Sometimes you hear a time such as early in the morning, or late at night, or weekends.   Meetings have the same disruptive quality that emails have.  They keep you from getting things done.  And the worst tool for creating this havoc is the open calendar in Outlook.  It screams… go ahead, make my day.

The worst offenders are poor managers.  They need to have meetings to see what you are doing.  Managers, please stop this behavior.

There is plenty written on the concepts of email and meetings.  But here’s my modest proposal.  If you want to improve the productivity of your organization try a couple of simple steps.

1. Create a no email time on Tuesday mornings from 9 AM to noon for internal emails.
2. Have no meetings the first two hour of each day, or alternatively no meetings on Wednesday afternoons.
3. Check your meeting ratio… the number of meetings you schedule for others or attend versus the time you allocate to get things done.  If the open time is less than 50% see #2.
4. Try having only one 15 minute meeting a week with your team.
5. Pray for a blizzard.

If you follow these guidelines, I absolutely guarantee that your productivity will skyrocket so much that you will have extra time to read email and hold meetings.