Point Oh!

I read something by one of my favorite bloggers yesterday that echoed a sentiment I hear a lot yet somehow really irked me this time.  Fred Wilson, one of the sharpest VC’s I’ve come across and someone who is endlessly generous about sharing his experience, wrote a well received post about how to get your email read.  You see, Fred, like a lot of people, can’t keep up with his email so he’s decided to carefully filter what he reads and responds to.  He references a conversation where he pointed out that he doesn’t read anything that doesn’t make it into his “Priority Inbox,” a feature of Gmail, and then gives tips on how to get included.  Since his business involves funding innovative start-up companies, this process surely results in some great ideas being lost in the shuffle.  It’s not a business of perfection and Fred seems to be doing just fine so this is obviously a reality that he’s comfortable with.

You see this a lot on social networks, which directly encourage you to scale your social graphs to a point where you can’t really manage the flow of content, but now that this has seeped into professional culture I have more of a problem with it.  Sure, most of the blowhard new media ninjas will tell you all about how growing their marginal personal brand as large as possible has paid huge dividends.  Adding everyone who’s ever been CCed in their inbox to their LinkedIn network has opened the door to connecting with an endless web of people connected to their industry.  It has expanded their universe well beyond what they ever could have achieved before these networks existed.

But is this really a sustainable way to maintain a professional reputation?  Is it even a responsible way to do business?

I don’t think it is and I’ve been trying to do something about it.

First of all, I still hold email to be one of the most direct forms of online communication.  While some people don’t put any more time into an email than they do an IM, I try to treat them like letters and respond to emails with at least the same attentiveness as they were sent to me.  Two years ago, when I was working for a global PR agency and discovered I was getting 170 emails a day across the 15 or so accounts I was touching and roughly 10 new business efforts that were going on at any moment, I made a conscious decision to change the way I manage projects to eliminate long strings of email.  By moving the majority of my open projects to Basecamp, I was able to cut down emails almost in half.  The best thing about this is that it eliminated the group emails, which were one of the biggest culprits, and allowed me to respond to issues in better context with all the related assets in one place (I always turn off email alerts in Basecamp and just leave it open in a browser tab to monitor).  Some people had trouble adapting to using project management software but I made it a requirement to work with me and I don’t recall any downside.

I also stopped publishing my email online.  This seems like a no brainer but if you can’t manage your email than you should remove the incentive for more people to use it.  There’s an assortment of less interruptive options, from Twitter to LinkedIn to commenting systems and even some contact forms.  I’m now much more careful about who gets my email.

Similarly, I only connect on LinkedIn with people I have decent established relationships with or if there are legitimate prospects to working directly with them in the future.  I don’t connect with vendors that I don’t use on a regular basis or casual acquaintances that I meet at an event.  While I realize that some people put a value on having more than 500 LinkedIn contacts, I’ve decided that it’s not worth creating another unmanageable channel, not to mention additional exposure to my email and other channels.

Twitter is an obvious one.  While I connect with some friends on Twitter, I definitely use it more for business (as my friends find out when I bore them to tears with my tweets about social media measurement).  I’ve cut the people I follow on Twitter by about 50% and now I’d say I see about 95% of what is posted.  If I respect you enough to follow you, I respect you enough to actually read what your content.

That said, I still use Priority Inbox and prioritize my communications.  It works pretty well.  I respond to timely “priority” emails, work my way through any additional emails and then eventually tackle emails that I have starred for later.  If an email sits in my inbox unread for more than a day, I feel that I’ve done someone a disservice.

So what if you get more than 170 emails a day?  It may be hard to swallow but you need to reduce the size of your professional network.  This requires actual management skills, which many people don’t have hard wired into their brains, but it is a problem that can be delegated and restructured into submission.  Going through this process shouldn’t cost you business, though it may cost you some of the false metrics you’ve used to boost your ego (I’m looking at you, guy following 20,000 people on Twitter to get followbacks).

This isn’t as much about technology than it is about business.  My dad owned a small insurance agency and when a tree hit your house he drove out, sat at your kitchen table and helped you fill out a claims form to get the roof fixed.  He rarely lost a client in more than 30 years in business.  If he had been solely focused on expanding his personal professional network beyond what he could manage, the results would’ve been much different.  Technology may confuse this lesson with the different ways it incentivizes you to take on more than you can handle but it doesn’t change the lessons of generations of businesspeople before you.