Tips and Insights

Since organizing is a relevant issue and a reoccurring theme for many companies employing 5S practices, I figure I have to say something about e-mail organization. Though I'm lucky enough not to receive 100 e-mails every day, I know people who do. I also know people who have thousands of e-mails stored somewhere, all waiting for something-a response, a reference . . . perhaps a burial.

E-mail, for many of us, has reached a point beyond usefulness and fallen into the realm of irritation and stress. When I have more than twenty e-mails in my in-box, I'm tempted to just hit the delete button. Surely we were not meant to hang on to all this information.

Because we're a small company, we've been given the freedom to use our skills and talents to fill niches as they become apparent. The leaders of the company happily delegate these tasks but recognize we need some oversight. Needless to say, their in-boxes are overflowing with copied and forwarded e-mails.

Recognizing this as a growing issue, we're now getting used to SharePoint, which, as I understand it, will end some of the e-mail nightmares that occur because we're trying to keep everyone informed. Instead, information-including e-mail discussions-will be stored on a server that everyone can access.

It's a good start, but as you've probably surmised, it still doesn't address all the issues. Several people have written articles with lots of solutions, and I especially like Stever Robbins' piece (a columnist for the Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge magazine). Not only does he give examples of good and bad e-mails, he also suggests that we figure out the per-minute rate it costs for each employee to read and respond to e-mail. When you multiply that number by the number of hours in a day, week, month . . . Well, you can imagine the steady trickle of money flowing down the drain.

One of his best suggestions, I believe, is the idea of training the senders. We know, of course, that we can't train clients how to send e-mails, but we can train ourselves (and maybe lead by example?).

Here are a few suggestions I like:

• Use the subject line as the whole message


• Include response expectations in the subject line
• NRN = No reply needed


• TY = Thank you


• NRB = Need response by (you fill in the date and time)
• Consider who you're copying and why, then tell each person what to do with the message


• Edit forwarded messages so they're appropriate for the next recipient

Even congress is inundated by e-mail, and they still haven't figured out a way to efficiently handle it (though one suggestion is to increase the budget for their offices-what a surprise). Since we don't have the luxury of extra money or staff to manage our e-mail, I guess we'll have to keep finding 5S solutions on our own.

Labels: 5S, Lean, organization, standardization