While we’re celebrating Administrative Professionals Week, I’ve been thinking a lot about some of the things many of us have lost as we take care of everything ourselves. The independence is great — who would want to go back to the old days of dictation or writing everything out by hand for someone else to type on a typewriter? But with email and voicemail, most of us no longer have knowledgeable gatekeepers, people who know us well enough to know that certain messages are urgent and that we should be interrupted, that others can wait, and some are not worth our time at all. Without that buffer, we must slog through the deluge of incoming messages that are not even sorted by relevance. We must learn ways to manage this input so we don’t miss the important stuff but still have time to focus and concentrate, to be creative and productive. We can discipline ourselves to check messages only during breaks, and there are ways to filter incoming email into folders and to reject known spam attacks.* But no electronic system can come close to the way a knowledgeable, attentive, real person could sort through that onslaught of messages and make our lives saner and more efficient.
*My Special Report includes tips for being the master of your interruptions and managing that email monsoon.
