“Tip #2: Do More Work When You Send or Reply to E-mails Consider the following standard e-mails: E-mail #1: “It was great to meet you last week. I’d love to follow up on some of those issues we discussed. Do you want to grab coffee?” E-mail #2: “We should get back to the research problem we discussed during my last visit. Remind me where we are with that?” E-mail #3: “I took a stab at that article we discussed. It’s attached. Thoughts?” These three examples should be familiar to most knowledge workers, as they’re representative of many of the messages that fill their inboxes. They’re also potential productivity land mines: How you respond to them will have a significant impact on how much time and attention the resulting conversation ultimately consumes. In particular, interrogative e-mails like these generate an initial instinct to dash off the quickest possible response that will clear the message—temporarily—out of your inbox. A quick response will, in the short term, provide you with some minor relief because you’re bouncing the responsibility implied by the message off your court and back onto the sender’s. This relief, however, is short-lived, as this responsibility will continue to bounce back again and again, continually sapping your time and attention. I suggest, therefore, that the right strategy when faced with a question of this type is to pause a moment before replying and take the time to answer the following key prompt: What is the project represented by this message, and what is the most efficient (in terms of messages generated) process for bringing this project to a successful conclusion?”