Managing Your Email - Emerging Nurse Leader

By Rose O. Sherman, EdD, RN, FAAN

It is not unusual for nurse leaders to get hundreds of work related emails a day. Learning to manage (not ignore) email is an important leadership skill so you don’t get totally overwhelmed and fall behind in other work. Here are 10 great strategies from the experts:

Schedule a time twice a day to read your email – have a planned time to read email. Don’t get into the habit of constantly looking at your messages. This can become a real distractor and does not give you time for other work you need to do.
Teach your staff how to communicate with you on email – One of the best things that you can do, to limit the amount of email you need to process, is encourage people to send you less. If you have staff who regularly send you long, drawn-out emails with more details than anyone needs – let them know you don’t have time to read this type of message. Ask them to keep emails no longer than a paragraph or two with a subject line that clearly outlines the purpose of the email. Anything longer than that should warrant a phone call. Alternatively, they could drop by your office for a discussion.
Set up an email folder system – organizing email makes it so much easier to deal with. A good folder system with topics like Immediate Follow-Up, Staffing Requests, XXX Committee can help you to prioritize and organize work.
Take action quickly – on any easy to deal with items, answer right away and keep your answers short and to the point – this will help you to keep the amount of follow-up down after initial reading.
Use the mark as unread feature – if you hover over an email, you will get a drop down menu that allows you to mark as unread which will keep the subject as bold so you can be sure to come back to it.
Consider an auto response on your email – Tim Ferriss who wrote the 4 Hour Work Week recommends that you let people know when you check email such as “I check my email twice a day at 8AM and 3PM – if you require urgent assistance – contact me at……..
Send less email yourself – you will get less email if you send less email and don’t cc anyone on an email who does not need to be on it. Often emails are in response to something that you have written so be sure to make your own emails essential.
Be clearer in your own email communication – often chain emails get started when an initial message is unclear. Make sure you are very clear in your communication as it will decrease the number of clarifying emails you receive.
Ask to be removed from a cc list if you don’t need to be on it – staff often worry about not keeping you in the loop. If you don’t need to be in a certain loop – let them know they can drop you.
Practice touching an email only once – act on/delete/file but don’t leave 10,000 emails in your inbox.

Will you ever feel fully in control of your email? Probably not but learning to manage it wisely can save you are great deal of time.