Hasta La Ideas

I’m horrible at processing email when I’m traveling for my job. Last month, when I was at the NAPO annual conference, I was once again reminded of my complete inadequacies in this area. I actually thought I had done better this time than usual, but on Monday morning when I sat down at my desk the more than 1,000 emails sitting in my work email account were proof that I had once again failed.

I admitted defeat and immediately sought advice from my friend Nick who works for a hotel chain and travels a good amount for his job. He started by saying, “not gonna lie, it’s tough.”

Want to know what words were oddly comforting to me? It’s tough. If a person who has been on the road a good amount doesn’t have it easy, I guess it makes sense that I wouldn’t have it easy, either.

After talking to Nick, I wrote to more of my friends and eventually posted the following request on Twitter: “Constant work travelers — What are your strategies for processing email when on the road? Share your seasoned advice with me!”

A slew of fantastic advice poured in, and I’m thankful to everyone who responded. Most of the advice identified major themes and philosophies for solving this problem and I’ve summarized this information:

• Tie yourself to a smartphone. If you want to stay on top of email, you have to keep a smartphone on you. Keep the ringer off and the message alerts set to vibrate.
• Enable automatic sorting and color coding in your smartphone’s email program. Have a filter that automatically routes all messages out of your inbox and into separate folders where you are copied instead of listed as the main recipient, all newsletters or read-only emails you subscribe to, and all emails from sources you know are not going to be must-respond-now messages. Have your system color code messages from your boss and/or other very important folks so these messages will catch your attention when they come into your main inbox. (If you’re on a Windows-based phone, there are macros and add-ins for Outlook you can install. If you can legally route your work email through Gmail, you can also do this. I was unable to find an app for the iPhone that enables these features.)
• Check messages during lulls in your schedule. As you wait in the line at the airport, switch between sessions at a conference, or grab a snack, process your priority emails then.
• Only check work email. If someone needs to contact you about an important personal matter, he/she will text or call you. Check your personal email account on weekends or after you get home from traveling.
• Only respond to items that can be handled in less than one minute. Delegate as much as possible, delete or archive anything that doesn’t need a response, and only send short messages of less than a paragraph to the priority emails you respond to.
• Manage expectations. Have an automated out-of-office message enabled on your account that says you will have limited access to emails and no one should expect a response until you are back in the office (be sure to list that specific date). Provide detailed contact information for someone in the office who may be able to handle emergencies, and give that person in the office your cell number so he/she can call you if there is a major event. Also, let your office contact know when you expect to be on flights and/or completely out of connection.
• Manage more expectations. When you reply to someone from your smartphone, have a “Sent from mobile device, please excuse typos and brevity” signature on the bottom of every message. You might also want to consider posting your return date on your out-of-office message as the day after you return so you have a full day to gather your bearings once you’re back in the office. Under promise, over deliver.
• Have access to cloud file storage. Not all smartphones allow you to attach documents, so you’ll need to be able to send links to documents stored online with services like Dropbox. If your employer doesn’t allow file posting online and attaching documents to emails is essential to your job, you’ll want to get the smallest, lightest laptop you can because you’re going to have to carry it with you instead of a smartphone.
• Work on email every night when you get to your hotel room. It will add to your workday, but taking 30 minutes or an hour every night to process the entirety of all your email inboxes and folders will guarantee you don’t have an avalanche of messages when you get back to your office.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that two people said responding to email while traveling for work is futile. One said she looks forward to having days free of the email interruptions and only answers phone calls, and another said he just deletes everything and believes if it’s really important the person will resend the email. I can’t imagine following either method, but certainly understand the sentiment.

Many thanks to Brian Kieffer, Nick Ayres, Tammy Schoch, Jorgen Sundgot, Generating Alpha, Dauerhippo, Courtney Miller-Callihan, Aaron Lilly, Fahryn Hoffman, Zacory Boatright, and Aviva Goldfarb for your advice and contributions to this article. If you’re someone who travels a great amount for work, please share your additional advice in the comments.

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Anyone who has stepped foot in a corporate work environment in the past 10 years is familiar with the phrase contingency plan. It’s the piece of your project where you try to determine ahead of time what you and/or your team will do when things go wrong. What will you do if a vendor doesn’t provide the quality of product you expected? What will you do if information is not received on time from the client? What will you do if a member of your team is ill and can’t make it to the sales meeting? What will you do if bad weather leads to your flight being cancelled?

You can drive yourself batty if you create a contingency plan for every possible step of the process that can go off course. A good way to determine if a step of the process needs a contingency plan or not is to estimate how much time it will take you to come up with an alternative if something does go wrong and determine which will be less expensive and a better use of your time: Creating a contingency plan during the project planning stage or simply handling the solution on the fly if/when a problem develops? If it is less expensive to create a contingency plan before you start work on a project than it is to solve the problem on the fly, do it. If it is more expensive to create a contingency plan before you start work on a project than it is to solve the problem on the fly, don’t do it. If it will save you time and money to come up with a contingency plan for a backup conference location if a hurricane destroys your conference hotel, create a contingency plan for an alternative site location. If it will waste your time and money to come up with a contingency plan for an alternate restaurant to deliver dinner to you at your desk on Tuesday night when you’re working late, don’t create a contingency plan. In short, the more important the element is to your project, the more likely you are to need a contingency plan.

Large projects aren’t the only areas of your work experience that can benefit from contingency planning. When you sit down at your desk first thing in the morning, you probably review and create a list of tasks you would like to accomplish by the end of the day. This list of action items might include meetings to attend, calls to make, emails to return, research to compile, writing assignments and all the other work specific to your job. To aid in your productivity, it is important to note what actions must get done by the end of the day so you don’t lose your job, and prioritize those important actions.

Even when you’re diligent and focused on getting your entire action list completed, unexpected events can derail you — the fire alarms can sound in the building or your building’s power can be disrupted or another work priority can take top billing. When the actions you must finish don’t get done, you have to go with an alternate plan.

The best contingency plan is one where you never need a contingency plan, but deadlines and botched work days are unavoidable in most workplaces. In lieu of avoidance, these are the common contingency plans I recommend employing when you must get things done and you’re behind schedule –

• Prevention: Block open time on your schedule. Not all industries allow for this, but in my current job I can usually leave 30 minutes each afternoon blank on my schedule. I almost always have something pressing to finish during this time, but if I don’t I use it for mindless work like filing or brainstorming blog post ideas. These open 30 minutes help me to better handle the unexpected disruptions over the course of the day.
• Power through. Obviously, you have the option to stay late and work into the night to finish your activities. This isn’t always an option, though, especially if the deadline was earlier in the day or if you need to be somewhere more pressing. It’s also not an option if you have been staying late for weeks and your overall productivity is being hampered by your late nights. Some employers allow you to take work home, and when done occasionally this might be a solution for you.
• Communicate and negotiate new deadlines. The minute you know you’re behind schedule and likely to miss the deadline, you need to communicate this to the people who are depending on you and negotiate a new deadline. You may need to update your project manager, boss, and/or client so they can adjust their schedules accordingly. The earlier you can notify individuals of your delay, the better. Sometimes estimations for how long something will take are wrong and this isn’t going to change through the entire project. Advanced communication about delays, when done infrequently and when you really are in dismay, can help you to be seen as a valued and trusted worker.
• Ask for help. If your job and work product allow for it, ask for help from coworkers or assistants. (In most workplace environments, making a request of another’s time does mean that you should help that person at a future point if your assistance is requested.) I’ve been in jobs where we’ve hired temporary employees to help prepare for conferences doing activities that must get done but don’t require special skill sets to complete. Simply requesting your boss help you to set new priorities can be an effective activity if you have a mentoring-style relationship with your boss.
• Delegate. Similar to asking for help, but in an environment where it is appropriate for you to assign work to others. Or, if you realize you are not the best person to complete the job, you can outsource the work to a person with the right skill set.

What common contingency plans do you employ when your work day and deadlines are blown to bits? Please share your strategies in the comments.

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Although I grew up spending weekends on our family farms shucking corn and talking to Bessie the Cow (all the cows had the same name, it was easier that way), I am a big-city girl at heart. I long to be in a city with a coffee shop right around the corner and pavement under my feet. And for most people, myself included, city living is synonymous with small-space living.

Even though I’m currently living in Suburbia, I’m looking forward to our next home that will hopefully be in a more metropolitan location. As a result, I am constantly on the lookout for space-saving solutions to use in our next big-city dwelling. The following are some of the terrific ideas that have recently caught my attention:

The website Apartment Therapy featured D.C. residents’ Josh and Lauren’s dining table artwork. It’s a table that hangs on the wall when not in use –

The now-defunct magazine Ready Made included a formica countertop on wheels in its article “Southern Comfort.” The countertop rolls into the kitchen for food preparation space and then rolls out into the remainder of the room to create a dining table –

Continuing with dining solutions, back in 2010, Dwell showcased a wall hiding a bookshelf that folded down to create a table set atop a rolling island –

Short walls are also called pony walls or knee walls and Better Homes and Garden suggests cutting into them to create untapped storage space in their article “26 Great Bathroom Storage Ideas” –

Have you spotted any small-space fixes recently? Share links to more space-saving ideas in the comments. I’m always searching for uncluttered and efficient solutions.

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I’ve been having an email exchange this morning with a woman who is looking to keep her desk organized while she works, which is especially difficult because she has a significant amount of physical paperwork she has to manage. She works in human resources and paperwork is unavoidable in her position. Accountants, billing managers, and anyone who works with hand-signed contracts likely have similar paper management concerns.

The paperwork she processes can be organized into groups, although most of those groups are regularly changing. For example, she’s constantly receiving resumes, but the jobs she is collecting resumes for change as openings for positions do. Having erasable file labels or a label maker will help folder identification change as the file needs change.

Having quick and easy access to those files is also important. I like working with tiered or separated desktop file organizers. My favorite is an expanding metal file organizer that adjusts to meet your size needs:

I also like non-adjustable tiered racks and tiered boxes. If a workspace is next to an empty wall, a wall-mounted pocket rack can do the same thing and not take up desk space:

Individual papers that don’t belong in groups, can always be suspended from clipboards, paperclips suspended from a piece of twine tacked to the wall or a bulletin board, or a restaurant ticket order holder:

As part of this paperwork management, it’s also important to shred, recycle, or file into an archived filing system papers and files as they are no longer being circulated. Be sure to schedule 10 minutes twice a week to review all the active papers and files to make sure you’re keeping inactive items out of your active system.

Do you have a constant flow of active papers and files crossing your desk over the course of a day? What products have you discovered to help you manage your work and keep papers and files from overwhelming your workspace? Share your suggestions in the comments.

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Reader James submitted the following to Ask Unclutterer:

I’ve read productivity books and articles that claim checking email first thing at work is a bad idea. I have been burned by not checking it because my boss and clients sent me important messages overnight and I didn’t get them until two hours later. What is your take on checking email? Is my overall productivity worth the times I’ve been burned?

I can see the reasoning behind not checking your email right when you get to work — you run the risk of getting caught up in work that might not be extremely important to your job responsibilities at a time when you’re likely at your most focused and productive. It would be better if you could use your best brain power on your most demanding and core work.

That being said, I check my email first thing when I get into work. I don’t really address it, though, I simply scan all the “from” and “subject” lines to search for work-altering messages. If I don’t see any indicators that someone sent me an email that will change my most demanding and core work, I immediately close my mail program and wait until I need a break from my demanding work around 10:00 a.m.

If I click on a message, read it, and discover it didn’t affect my immediate work day, I mark the message as “unread” so it can hang out until I process email in a couple hours.

If I click on a message, read it, and discover it does affect my immediate work, I’ll process the email the same way I do when I’m really handling email. This means I’ll file it as Archived, add related next actions to my to-do list, and/or schedule any related information on my calendar. If I need to reply to the email, I do it at this time. After giving proper attention to the email, I’ll scan the rest of the inbox to see if there is anything else I must check. If I’m done with my quick search, I’ll quit the program and wait to address the other issues at 10:00 a.m.

I chose my times for checking email based on when I do my mindful and mindless work over the course of the day — scan at 8:00 a.m., full check at 10:00 a.m., full check after lunch around 1:00 p.m., a scan around 3:00 p.m., and then a final end-of-workday check at 5:00 p.m. I do not have my new message indicator light on my email program activated, and I actually completely close out of the program when not in use. If your job allows you to behave in this manner, I strongly recommend it. It significantly helps my productivity to not be tempted to check email constantly.

Thank you, James, for submitting your question for our Ask Unclutterer column. Please check the comments for even more suggestions from our readers.

Do you have a question relating to organizing, cleaning, home and office projects, productivity, or any problems you think the Unclutterer team could help you solve? To submit your questions to Ask Unclutterer, go to our contact page and type your question in the content field. Please list the subject of your e-mail as “Ask Unclutterer.” If you feel comfortable sharing images of the spaces that trouble you, let us know about them. The more information we have about your specific issue, the better.

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