FIFO: FIRST IN, FIRST OUT – THE KEY FOR EFFICIENCY
So… you’ve arrived at the office and your inbox is full… the question is – how do you go about handling those e-mails (or handling the incoming phone calls, employees' requests, customers' complaints or anything else for that matter)? THIS is the subject of today’s 2nd tip.
But, before we continue, you’ve heard the word “power”, or becoming more “powerful”, thrown around in these tips. It’s important you understand this concept. Let’s stop and define it:
Power equals energy divided by time, or P (power) = E (energy) / T (time).
Simply put, what does this mean? Your power level gets determined by how much energy you have to
put into getting something done and then how long that took you. Therefore, you have two options:
Increasing your energy levels (a subject we’ll cover in the future), and;
Doing your actions in less time – by becoming efficient of course!
Let’s assume for the moment that your energy is constant. The more time you put on something to get it done, the less powerful you are. A company that takes five years to build a small house is less powerful than a company that takes one year to build the same house. What you must understand is that the only power you can generate comes about with focus and concentration which will bring about less time spent on any given action. One more simple example: Let’s say you wrote a five page document in an hour… if you wrote that same five page document in a half hour, in effect, you’d be creating more time and that would lead to the creation of POWER. Does that make sense?
FIFO: FIRST IN, FIRST OUT – THE KEY FOR EFFICIENCY
Well, how is this relevant to e-mails?
When you handle e-mails randomly (picking them based on how easy they are to reply to, etc.), you will inevitably be doing double work. You will spend time on finding the e-mails you “like” and thinking about putting them on the infamous scale between “easy to reply to” and “I don’t even want to think about this thing right now… or for the next three months.” You’ll then come back to some of the e-mails later, maybe repeat this process, and basically you will be allowing “time to come in”, or to be spent unproductively.
We’ve all done it!