Taming that email beast

Sometimes I wish Cookie Monster would eat all my large attachments. Image courtesy of entrepreneur.com

Email.  It might as well be a four-lettered word.  Email can absolutely consume our professional and personal lives.  You can finish a day and wonder "Wow, I spent all day answering email, and yet I feel like I got nothing done."

Especially if you work on a staff, email is probably the bane of your existence.  And yet, it shouldn't be.  Email should be a great enabler, letting you get in contact with people around the world and quickly share text and other attachments.  Yet the Navy has morphed email into a monster that consumes our time and energy into a never-ending vortex of declining productivity.

How do you tame this monster?  Luckily the good folks at Manager Tools have a few answers in a recent news post:

How to conduct a 360 degree assessment

There is a certain appeal with being the "big idea" guy.  You dream up great plans, working out everything in your head, and if ONLY you had the time, resources and people, you could make it all work.  Even better, if you do get the chance to try an idea out and it fails, the blame normally shifts to the users...if only they were smarter/worked harder/etc.

I think 360 degree reviews are one of those big ideas that nobody sat down and tried to work out.  There is an allure with being able to give feedback to your boss when you normally exist in one of the most rank-conscious bureaucracies that exists.  That being said, most of us that have more than 2 years in the Navy realize very quickly how this can go horribly wrong.  Our bosses have immense power over us, and like most people we hold our tongues more often than not.

Working with Intelink, I've finally found a way to conduct a 360 degree review in an electronic way that is anonymous, easily replicated and controllable.

Just sprinkle some technology on it!

Mobile computing is awesome.  I've used my cell phone to do all sorts of things, from banking and learning foreign languages to checking email and reading my latest news feed.  The MCPON is also looking to tap into this trend and has talked about getting a tablet for every Sailor:

http://www.navytimes.com/article/20140630/NEWS04/306300020/MCPON-wants-every-sailor-tablet

If I had to pick how to roll out a massive tablet purchase, I'd do the following:

Rethinking your check in process

At my last command, I owned the command indoc program.  My staff and I spent a considerable amount of time streamlining the process so that new check-ins would get into their shops as quickly as possible, while also being ready to start work.  One of my second class petty officers got tired of the sheer amount of paper that was being printed for one time use stuff, such as the Information Assurance certificates from NKO.  He started having new check-ins save the files electronically and drop them into a shared folder on Intelink's Inteldocs website.  He set up the folder to email him when a file was added, which prompted him to login and update that Sailors record.

Overall, we eliminated 800+ pages a year, plus we cut out about 200 man hours of work.  I don't know how much toner we saved, but it had to be significant, not to mention the time it takes to track down a cartridge and replace it.