Leadership and Life Essentials: Stop Hiding Behind Your Inbox - Three Ways Leaders Misuse Email

How many emails are in your inbox right now, just waiting for your attention, screaming out to you? What are you thinking or feeling as you look at that number? Now, I want you to think back to when you first started using email.

So yeah, that AOL account.

For a lot of us, it felt like a genuine breakthrough.

No more phone take.

No more waiting for somebody to be at their desk.

I can send a message at 10 p.m.

The other's going to have it first thing in the morning.

It was faster, cleaner.

It created a record of what was said.

And we thought it was going to save us time.

And in a lot of ways, it did.

It revolutionized communication in so many ways.

The challenge is that companies never developed communication protocols as these communication tools such as emails emerged.

And then we started using these things for everything and without consistency.

Questions that needed a conversation, email them.

Feedback that needs a human voice, oh, we'll just email them.

Conflict that needs to be worked through, I'll just fire off an email.

Nuanced conversations.

Announcements that were meant for one person but got sent to 20.

And somewhere in there, email stopped being the time saver and started to become a problem.

Most leaders I talk to feel buried in their inbox.

They're spending hours on email every day.

And a good chunk of that time is being created by the way they and some of their teams are using it.

So today I want to talk about three ways that people misuse email and what to do instead.