Email is a part of my life as a pastor at Resurrection. From communicating with staff, congregation members, volunteers and other pastors it can be a great way to continue a conversation. As a result, I sometimes arrive back on Monday with a crazy number of emails that have built up in my inbox from my day off on Friday and over the weekend. What to do?
I recently read a manifesto from ChangeThis titled – The Low-Information Diet: How to Eliminate E-Mail Overload & Triple Productivity in 24 Hours by Tim Ferriss. I am not sure about the tripling of productivity in 24 hours, but this document has some great tips on how to manage email in a way that makes sense. Ferriss suggests three steps:
- Decrease Frequency
- Decrease Volume
- Increase Speed
Each of the steps has specific tactics about how to accomplish that particular goal. I have begun to incorporate some of these things into my work at Resurrection. How much do you communicate with email? How do you use email in your life?
Feel free to send me an email from the About Me page.
Rev. Andrew Conard 
2 replies on “The Low Information Diet”
Personally, I dislike email, almost as much as I dislike texting. I think I get too many of them at work. I would estimate that about 87% of the emails I receive at work (and these aren’t spam, but from other staff) are completely superfluous or completely unrelated to me in any way, yet I still get them, and I am constantly wondering why.
Maybe it’s just me. 🙂
I hear you. Another tactic that I read about cutting down on email is replying with five sentences or less to everything. Doesn’t matter who. Doesn’t matter what topic.