Life Of E's

Let’s talk about the notion of DEFER as a sane and sensible email practice. What does ‘defer’ mean? First of all, defer does not mean procrastinate. To defer something is a deliberate decision that you make. As far as email is concerned, you could decide to defer an email for several reasons, such as:

• You are too tired to respond or to take action on the prompt.
• You don’t have time right now to handle the request.
• The information you need to have to formulate your answer or deal with the request is not available at this time.
• It’s an emotionally-charged issue and you have the wisdom not to just hit reply and fire off an answer.
• The request is not time-sensitive in the least and there’s no need to deal with it right now.
• Or any of a number of other reasons….

The main idea for you to keep in mind is that you are consciously and very deliberately DECIDING to DEFER. So, now, here’s the question. What do you do with those emails that you’ve deferred?  Read on to tomorrow’s post…and check out some of the resources at: 

**Top Ten Productivity Tips (http://www.TopTenProductivityTips.com)
**Keys to Keeping Chaos at Bay (http://www.KeepingChaosatBay.com)

(c) 2009 by Meggin McIntosh, Ph.D., “The Ph.D. of Productivity”(tm). Through her company, Emphasis on Excellence, Inc., Meggin McIntosh changes what people know, feel, dream, and do. Sound interesting? It is!

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Tags: ASAR, backlog, defer, email, inbox, WF