You arrive at your office Monday morning and begin the day by accessing your e-mail. How long will it take before you actually get to your day's agenda? I have found that wading through the e-mail can take as long as three hours! Several factors have combined to create this communications meltdown. The underlying driver is technology that has made it easy to send messages–and to send them to multiple recipients.

When someone wanted to send a message in the days before the Internet, the sender had to prepare it–often with the help of a second person who typed and maybe edited it–and then see that it got into the hands of the U.S. Postal Service. In contrast, sending a message today requires relatively little effort. E-mail programs make it easy to paste in a long list of recipients' e-mail addresses and even can help with the editing. Since it's so easy to send e-mail, we all find ourselves spending a lot of time sorting important messages from those that are unimportant or even unwanted (spam).

Agents must take the initiative to reduce the volume of needless communication. One of the first steps is to ask all of your friends to remove you from their distribution lists of jokes, comics and graphic attachments that find their way into your business electronic mailbox. Do the same for them and agree to two new practices: First, you will send these messages only to their personal (non-business) e-mail addresses. Second, agree that you will send no more than a certain number of such messages to your friends in a given period. When I first asked my friends several years ago to delete me from their e-mail lists, they were offended–but that passed when I continued to call them on the phone to catch up. In time, they understood that I needed to reduce my electronic communications to a controllable level.