Become an Inbox Processing Machine
Treat your email inbox like your physical mailbox at home or the office. Do you leave your mail in the mailbox or do you take it inside the house, open it, sort it, and act on it? Do you leave birthday cards unopened, checks un-cashed, or bills unpaid? Probably not! You should apply these same practices to your email inbox.

Limiting Email Interruptions
Unless you staff a technology help desk or deal with extremely time sensitive matters, you should not check your email every minute of the day or every time you are alerted that an email has arrived. You should schedule time to check your email periodically throughout the day and you may want to turn off your email arrival notification. This limits interruptions and allows you to focus on projects, etc. that require thoughtful attention.

Attend to Easy Emails First
Every time you do check your email, act on the easy emails first. By easy, I mean emails that take no more than five seconds to process. Anything longer is not easy. Some examples of acting on them are: accepting or declining a calendar invite, giving authority to a request, acknowledging that you received a task request (then documenting the request in a task system), deleting junk email, forwarding email to relevant parties, or reading email and then archiving it.

What About Emails That Aren’t “Easy”?
Emails that are not easy—those that demand more than five seconds of your time—should be moved into a folder called “To Review” or “Emails to Review”, etc. These emails might: be long and take time to read and understand; require a thoughtful or lengthy reply; contain multiple to-dos; or represent a combination of the above. You should set aside portions of time during your day to deal with these emails; and it is helpful to arrange your time so that you are dealing with them when you have your highest energy levels. If you work best in the morning, try to tackle these emails then or vice versa if your energy peaks in the afternoon. Ideally, your “To Review” folder will be empty at the end of the day, along with your email inbox.

How to Get Started?
Great, you say, but what if I have 10,000 items in my inbox. Do I need to sift through them all? What can I do?

• Create a new folder or label called inbox-archive or inbox-(date), etc.
• Take all emails over a month or two old and move them into your new folder. If you have not dealt with them yet, you probably won’t start until you have good habits and you need a clean inbox to start good habits.
• Then go through the emails remaining in your inbox and deal with them.

Archiving
Archiving refers to moving an email to a relevant folder or label. I use archives for permanently storing information. My archive folders are organized according to clients, subject, and/or projects and I move all related emails into these folders. Your IT systems should support large mailboxes as cleaning out email is costly from a staff time perspective. It is far cheaper to increase mailbox space than force users to sift through old emails and determine what can be deleted, with the hope that the email is not something you’ll need at a future date.

That being said, emails in the Deleted Items folder are trash. This folder is only for items you can live without. If you can not live without them, they don’t belong there. They need to be archived.

Create an Effective System to Track Your Tasks
Many people use their email inbox as a task management system. Your email inbox is an effective tool for communication; it is a system for sending, receiving, and storing information. It should not be used as a task management system; it confuses the purpose and reduces your efficiency when you try to use your email inbox as a task management system. A task management system’s purpose is to compile tasks, allow you to easily organize and prioritize them, and cross them off when they have been completed. You may want to track tasks on a notepad, a Word document called “Tasks,” or a task management software (Doit.im, Remember the Milk, OmniFocus, Outlook’s Tasks, or Google’s Task Features). Task management software allows you to categorize tasks, associate dates, etc. At the beginning and end of every day you can quickly refer to the tasks, re-prioritize, and set your schedule.

These quick tips should help you progress from email overload to email inbox efficiency. I hope increased email management effectiveness will boost your success in the year ahead. Best wishes for a happy and prosperous 2012.

Russell Greenwald manages Insource Services, Inc.’s IT Consulting Practice. Insource provides expert advice and services to help clients use technology to increase their effectiveness and efficiency.

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In managing toward the goal of operating as effectively and efficiently as possible, it can be helpful to benchmark your business against competitors or similar type businesses and set up a management “dashboard” which summarizes, in a clear, concise manner, the data you need to act upon to successfully manage your business. The information to assist you in benchmarking and devising a dashboard is readily available. A great site for information on public companies, in addition to their own websites, is http://www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/companysearch.html.

The SEC’s Edgar database provides “free” public access to corporate information, allowing you to research a public company’s financial information and operations by reviewing registration statements, prospectuses, and periodic reports filed on Forms 10-K and 10-Q. You also can find information about recent corporate events on Form 8-K. At either the Edgar website or the company’s website, you can access quarterly and annual reports and investor presentations which provide a good overview of a company’s strategy, goals, and the metrics its management focuses on to run the business.

For example, a local technology company, Mercury Computer Systems, in Chelmsford, MA, recently posted its 12th Annual Investor Conference presentation on the Edgar site. In the financial review section of the presentation you can see that the company tracks, among other things: bookings, backlog, revenues, profits, cash flow, and balance sheet liquidity. It has a target financial business model, which outlines target levels for gross margin, operating expenses, R&D, operating income and adjusted EBITDA. If your company was in a similar line of business, this would be valuable information you can use for benchmarking and to help you as you think through the metrics for your dashboard.

From a nonprofit organization perspective, we’d like to remind you of the “bargains” offered to you by TechSoup.org. TechSoup is a nonprofit whose mission is to provide other nonprofits and libraries with technology that empowers them to fulfill their missions and serve their communities. As part of that goal, the organization provides technology products and information geared specifically to nonprofits and libraries. All donated and discounted products are available for a small administrative fee that supports the organization. For example, on the website at the time of this article, TechSoup is offering Microsoft Office 2010 (various versions) for administrative fees ranging from $23 to $31. TechSoup also offers learning resources such as articles, blogs and free webinars. Its donor partners include Microsoft, Adobe, Cisco, Intuit, and Symantec.

Another great technology bargain for nonprofits comes from The Salesforce.com Foundation. The foundation provides 10 Enterprise Edition licenses to qualified nonprofit organizations at no cost – yes, we said “free”. This software is a leading product for contact management and can help you organize your constituent relationships – donors, volunteers, etc. – giving you access to this information in a way that helps you optimize these relationships.

So, check your technology road map, and capitalize on some great deals on technology that can improve your efficiency and help you do more with less.

If you would like help benchmarking your organization to other similar organizations, developing a management dashboard report, or building a technology road map, Insource Services can help.
Finally, one gift that we would like to extend to you is a genuine thank you. We sincerely thank you for your business and your support in 2011. We look forward to working with you in 2012 and wish you all the best in the New Year!

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On November 17th we were a sponsoring presenter at an event organized by TANGO (www.tangoalliance.com) on best practices for nonprofits. The event covered a range of topics of interest to nonprofit organizations from navigating the social media landscape to health care reform, and included our presentation on Nuts & Bolts in Growing Your Organization.

Our practice leaders Chris Bertoncini (Finance), Saleha Walsh (Human Resources), and Russell Greenwald (Technology) presented to a packed room of nonprofit leaders outlining tools and steps for working more efficiently and effectively in the areas of Finance, Human Resources and Technology. Many best practices were detailed. Some thought-provoking comments from our presentation (which you can access by clicking on the link below) include:

• Finance – Finance is a service function for the rest of your organization
  Communication and collaboration between finance and the rest of your organization is key
• Human Resources – The hiring process is an opportunity to market to all of the candidates you don’t hire. Do it well and respectfully.
• Technology – Do you have confirmed backups of all your data?
  Test this: Delete a file that has been stored on your system (after saving it again outside your system) and ask your IT support to provide you a copy of it – see how the process unfolds
• Mitigate risk – know what you know, get help where you need it

Threads that ran through the presentation can be summarized by: (1) Map where you want/need to head; (2) Put systems in place when you recognize you need them, don’t wait until the “opportune time”; (3) Systematize your processes – don’t reinvent the wheel. Create checklists, forms, and templates that can be customized. This standardization supports your financial/program audits; it demonstrates your professionalism; and (4) Periodically assess your systems and practices to assure compliance, efficiency, and effectiveness.

We left the event empowered by the energy created by the more than 100 nonprofit leaders and professionals in attendance. The event sparked new dialogue and connections among the attendees. We trust that every attendee left with new tactics to propel their missions forward.

The concept of a periodic assessment of your systems and practices is a key best practice. At Insource Services, we are frequently engaged by clients to assess the current state of their systems and processes. We document the current system status, make recommendations, and prioritize and implement cost-effective solutions. What really distinguishes our team is our troubleshooting ability. We are adept at identifying and eliminating problems and differ from many consultants in that we have an operational focus and “own the problems” at our client organizations. Please contact us if you would like to learn more about our assessment services.

To see some of the presentations, please visit our TANGO Best Practices for Nonprofits page

P.S. Unexpectedly, the Technology segment of the presentation was cut short by a fire alarm (false alarm). Therefore, Russell will be holding a webinar on Thursday, December 1st at 2pm to present his entire segment of our talk. If you are interested in participating in the webinar, please contact Sharon Stone at sstone@insourceservices.com.

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Ellen and Project Bread staff think outside the box and bring a “consider what isn’t usual” approach to expanding the reach and effectiveness of their mission/business, all the while keeping the organization “client focused”. From this sort of mindset, Project Bread developed the “Chefs in Schools” initiative to connect low-income children with healthy, high-quality food. Chefs in Schools began in 2007 as a partnership between Project Bread, Mayor Thomas Menino, Boston Public Schools (BPS) and the Boston Public Health Commission. The program, an unusual approach to eradicating hunger, has developed and grown and boasts proven results. It continues to gain support and, in August, 2011, Arbella Insurance Group Charitable Foundation pledged $1 Million over four years to support Project Bread’s “Healthy School Food for Kids Initiative” which includes Chefs in Schools.

We were also particularly struck by Ellen’s comment to the nonprofits in the audience that there is always an academic partner for your business. In Project Bread’s case this includes partnering with the Harvard School of Public Health for nutritional science expertise as well as with the Friedman School of Nutrition at Tufts which created “toolkits” that help school nutrition directors make healthy purchasing decisions. While the “collaboration” or relationship would be different for a nonprofit versus a for-profit, this is an interesting concept for any organization looking to expand its human and intangible capital assets and where else better to execute this strategy than in Massachusetts, home to a wealth of academic institutions.

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