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.

Next get a good spam catcher, which can help eliminate another large body of unwanted e-mail.

After taking these steps you still will have a lot of important business e-mail to process. Much of this information comes from your carriers. A key to saving time in handling it is to minimize the need for your staff to process it, forward it, etc. For instance, rather than send you separate listings of policies pending cancellation, companies should transmit “alerts,” downloadable directly into the agency management system's client files. Insurers can send many similar communications directly to their ultimate destinations. This will spare someone in the agency the task of opening the current policy list and then forwarding it to various people in the agency for disposition of individual accounts.

Another key to saving time is to clearly identify the purpose of your messages in the subject lines. (Of course, those who send you e-mail messages should do the same.) A clear identifier in a subject line will make it much easier for your recipient to decide whether the communication is something that needs priority attention or can be handled later. If you exchange communications between agency offices, or between your agency and your companies, establish a standard methodology for subject heading by class of communication. That will enable the recipient to use a “Rules Wizard” to separate messages that need immediate handling from those that don't.

I often get messages from someone who clicks the “reply” button on a previous communication, thereby giving the new message the subject line of the previous, unrelated message. This leads to misunderstanding and impedes the efficient handling of e-mail. If you are forwarding a message from someone and adding additional text, then change the subject title, so the recipient easily can identify your message from the forwarded message. If you are sending just an attachment, then use the subject line to explain its significance.

By making a few changes in your communications “style,” you can make life a lot easier for your e-mail recipients. Make some friends; spare them your unnecessary or unclear e-mail messages–and ask them to do the same for you.