E-mail 5S

A Wall Street Journal article today says How You Handle Your E-mail Inbox Says A Lot About You. The article identifies that e-mail is overwhelming people. There is an example of one person who was stressed out by 500 e-mails in their inbox, another who had 10,000 e-mails in their inbox. This article should be readable without a subscription as it was in the Free Today section.
What does it mean that I have a desire to empty my inbox each day? It could be “how Mom and Dad raised you” as the article says, or it could be that Lean thinking has seeped into my e-mail habits.
Part of the kaizen philosophy is “do today’s work today” which is really just one-piece flow thinking at a macro level (or vice versa). Typically I have between 3 and 12 e-mails in my inbox at the end of the day. This is visual control, as 12 is about as many as will display on a less than full-size Outlook window on a laptop, without scrolling. If there are many more e-mails in the inbox than that and I am putting in service overtime to get rid of them.
E-mail is inventory. It is WIP. You might not think so since it’s just electrons and e-mail doesn’t appear to “cost” anything. No direct material cost, perhaps, but there is definitely labor and overhead associated with e-mail. Labor and thought had to go into creating an e-mail message, and a software and hardware infrastructure has to support its transmission, and an IT labor has to support the hardware and the software infrastructure.
What is the cost of one e-mail message? Write it down and put it in the post to me if you know.
After examining what I did with my e-mail and how Microsoft Outlook was set up to handle incoming mail, I realized there is a very specific application of 5S at work here:
Sort the e-mails you don’t need
– Read e-mail. Act on it or delete it.
– Junk. Outlook does this for me automatically.
– Spam filters are set so that large numbers of e-mail never see the inbox.
Straighten the inbox, as in “a place for everything and everything in its place”
– Put e-mails you need to act on in the proper folder. This may be right in the inbox or separate folders.
– Sequence and prioritize for later action.
Sweep in 5S is cleaning to prevent future cleaning. E-mail 5S sweep is to get rid of e-mails and prevent them coming back.
– Block, don’t delete. Blocking the senders of spam who make it into the inbox can prevent repeat offenders.
– Unsubscribe to newsgroups or other e-mail marketing rather than deleting them.
– Don’t reply to informational e-mails with “Thanks” and certainly don’t CC everyone. If you want to say thanks do it by voice or better yet in person.
Standardize how you handle e-mail
– Check e-mail at certain times of day rather than playing whack-a-mole with every new “you’ve got mail”.
– Agree to limit who is Carbon Copied (CC) so that extra inbox material is not created.
– Spend a set amount of time on e-mail checking.
– Let people know how best to get a hold of you if it’s urgent (other than e-mail).
Self-Discipline
– Spend enough time on a message to get it done and out of the way. If you can’t don’t start it and create WIP.
– At the same time, leave some Standard WIP at the end of the day. For non-urgent items send out replies or requests at the end of the day so that you have actionable replies waiting in your inbox by the next morning or next time you set to check e-mails.
– Don’t check e-mail. This might seem counterintuitive but if we all did it we would all have less e-mail in our inboxes. Think about it.
I read a promising review of a book called Total Workday Control by Michael Linenberger that addresses your e-mail headaches. I also heard that the new operating system Windows Vista will cut down e-mail by 80% to 90%. I don’t know what this means but it sounds intriguing. But until then I have the daily sort and straighten of e-mail 5S.

---