Ever had an email with THAT in the subject line?

We all get them… Thing is, what do you do about it? Personally, if someone sends me an ‘urgent’ EMAIL. I ignore it for at least 6 hours. Why? A number of reasons:

1. If it’s that urgent, they’d pick up the phone, which I ALWAYS answer.

2. People need to learn that everything is the new urgent thing.

What happens, is this: Client emails an urgent email, (which isn’t urgent at all). You stop what you’re doing (their work) and respond to it. Then another client does the same thing, and the phone rings and another email comes in, and before long – your day is gone!

It’s deadline time, your client is super excited to see your designs and his brand new site. You turn up and can’t really explain why it’s not done, but it’s not. He’s not happy and the relationship vanishes from there. We’re all busy, (unless you suck, in which case you won’t have any work) so it’s incredibly important to ma

nage “urgent” requests properly. So that begs the question, how do you respond to an urgent email request without acting on it.

Answer: You don’t!

It’s simple, don’t respond. There are a number of ways to do this, you can proactively tell people you’re checking email less (Tim Ferriss style). However, I tried this and got complaints for the annoying auto-responder. I’ve found the best way, is literally to only check email twice a day. It’s insane how much more work you get done! What’s better, I haven’t had a “complaint” or “stroppy email” in over a year and a half. I can assume the reason for this is, we get the work done when we say we’re going to do it.

Clients occasionally email with something urgent and I smile to myself and ignore it for half a day, knowing that if it’s that urgent, I’ll receieve a phonecall.

Last year I spent a month in Denia, Spain to test how well the business worked if I was only working a few hours a day. I learned more about productivity sitting by a pool in 27degree heat than I did reading books or working my ass off back home. People had urgent enquiries, they’d email through in the morning, because I didn’t respond immediately (who does anyway) they would solve their own problems!

Bottom line is, every one’s happier when you hit deadlines. Nobody will remember their not-really-urgent-but-i’ll-pretend-it-is email, they certainly won’t consider it a reasonable excuse for not delivering on-time.

Ignore your clients and make them happy!