What does “delegating” mean to you? Which of these definitions resonates?

1. Delegating means assigning work to a more junior colleague, supervising that work closely, correcting it, and thoroughly reviewing it to ensure it’s correct before sending it to the client or requester.
2. Delegating means assigning work to a more junior colleague, instructing the colleague in how to do the work to your standards, and thoroughly reviewing it to ensure it’s correct before sending it to the client or requester.
3. Delegating means assigning the work to a colleague competent in that work, ensuring that the colleague fully understands the goals, vision, and constraints behind that work, discussing progress on a regular but not intrusive basis, and briefly reviewing it before the colleague sends it to the client or requester.

We might refer to these three methods as

1. Closely supervising
2. Guiding
3. Partnering

Note that the major difference between #1 and #2 is that #1 corrects work after it’s done and #2 instructs how to do it before it’s done. The big similarity is that the delegator will spend a lot of time redoing work that’s already been done, convinced that the right way to do it is the same as the delegator’s way to do it. Perhaps you redo the work “looking over the shoulder” of the junior colleague, or perhaps you redo it after she’s handed it off to you… but there is a lot of rework.

Is that efficient for a client?

My kids head back to school in a few days, and #1 and #2 closely parallel school assignments, albeit without a client. The teacher instructs how to do X, or corrects it after the student does it, or often both.

Are you acting like a teacher when you delegate? That’s okay, if you’re consciously teaching… but is it right to bill a client for teaching? And is that the best use of your own time?

The third method is different in two ways, one minor, one major. The minor difference is the omission of “junior” before colleague; you can delegate work to a peer, a more junior colleague, or even “delegate up.” (Yes, that’s legit, and it’s a real and useful skill.)

The major difference is this: “There are multiple right ways to do X, and mine is but one of them.”

In other words, you trust and rely on your colleague to solve the right problem in any right way.

Method #3 seems incredibly hard for many attorneys to master. They may agree with it intellectually, but they say, “It’s my neck on the client’s chopping block.”

To which I might answer, “It’s the firm’s neck on the chopping block, and both you and your colleague work for the firm.” (I might also add, sotto voce, “And you never make a mistake, right?”)

Proper delegation is an interesting aspect of Legal Project Management. Ineffective delegation is one place where projects start running away from estimates.

Ineffective delegation can mean treating a junior associate as a partner in the project before he’s ready — doing #3 when what’s really needed is training — but that’s rare. More common is failing to use method #3, doing double work, and running over budget and/or writing off time. You also turn the junior colleague into a retention risk, unsatisfied with the way you or the firm operate. Perhaps he’ll leave, though in today’s economy that’s less likely. Perhaps he’ll try hard to work with other folks instead of you. Most likely, he’ll bide his time until he’s the delegator… and then inflict the same stuff upon his junior colleagues, perpetuating an inefficient system.

There’s opportunity here for increase efficiency and stronger working relationships… but as with most opportunities, you have to reach out to grab them, which always has at least a sense of risk.

A client asked recently, “How would you determine whether someone’s a good trainer in this field [Legal Project Management]?”

I came up with a brief list of traits to look for — requirements, in a sense:

1. Passion for the subject: A passion for the topic, as well as an ongoing commitment to it as a specialty, is a must for a trainer in any subject. Legal Project Management is an area where a number of people are putting a toe in the water. It’s an emerging discipline, and so it’s no surprise that a number of training organizations and consultancies are testing its revenue potential. Starting with a toe in the water is fine, but by now those serious about it ought be more than halfway in.
2. Experience in three disparate areas: Legal Project Management itself is a mixed discipline involving 1) project management and 2) the legal world; to those add 3) instructional design and instructor-led training (ILT) skills. Training itself is a skill unrelated to either the law or project management. An ILT leader who doesn’t understand instructional design or how people learn will be ineffective as a trainer no matter how much experience he or she may have in the legal or project management worlds.
3. Skilled and engaging presenter and leader: Given the extent to which training has a trainer rather than a watch-how-I-do-it mentor at the center, the trainer must be able to engage and hold an audience made up of a mixture of early adopters and skeptics. Likewise, the trainer must have leadership skills; he or she, after all, will need to reach and motivate attorneys who by nature are suspicious of those who purport they have something to teach. At the same time, partners don’t want to feel like they’re back in law school.
4. Able to define “project management” and “project manager” without once using the word “schedule” or a synonym: Does the trainer  understand the difference between traditional project management and Legal Project Management? Can she quickly transmit that understanding? The principles are the same, but the core skills are different, the practitioners (attorneys) are of different makeup and temperament, and the science itself is different. Too many project managers in less determinate areas, whether software development or professional service delivery such as the legal world, think PM is about schedules, dependencies, and powerful but complex tools such as Microsoft Project. LPM may involve these areas, but it neither stems from nor centers around them.

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Back in my corporate days, I used to instruct my department and others annually on the inner workings of the performance-review and compensation process. It’s a complex, interdependent system — and it’s a tense subject for many employees because they see their careers and earnings ground through the gears of a system they suspect is biased against them somehow. For a time, I did this training informally over lunch, a half dozen employees at a time. However, because of the highly mathematical nature of some of the moving parts and the density of information, I then turned it into a presentation assisted by PowerPoint diagrams. The lunches were the better method, I discovered. There was a certain amount of “lunch with the boss” effect, but mostly they worked better because they forced me to approach this training by leading it rather than presenting it, as a leader rather than a presenter. I didn’t need the diagrams in the slides nearly as much as I needed to connect with those I was teaching, a lesson for the teacher that I’ve taken to heart.

To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke, from the outside any sufficiently complex system is indistinguishable from magic. The review/compensation process as most corporations certainly qualifies. So does project management, whether Legal Project Management or traditional PM. Training, too, has its own “magic.” The magic of good training guides attendees through the complexity barrier into an understanding of the complex system at hand.

Yesterday was the first day of the ILTA Conference, the International Legal Technology Conference. I’m not there this year; I couldn’t work it into my schedule. In a way that’s too bad, because it sounds like I’d have had a fun time arguing with one of the speakers.

According to reports, a speaker said stuff along the following lines:

1. Legal Project Management (LPM) depends on measurement and process.
2. Document the work before thinking about what to measure.
3. Management buy-in comes from having good metrics.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Worse, most of it’s backwards, cart-before-horse backwards — thus the title of this article.

In the speaker’s partial defense, the discussion was on an e-discovery track, which is not truly LPM but a blend that’s sometimes much closer to traditional project management. Also in the speaker’s defense — which is why I’m not naming anyone — I wasn’t there, and these reports are based on what others wrote about the content. For all I know, writers got the speaker’s points backwards.

Nonetheless, I firmly believe all three of these points are not only wrong, but will lead to unintended results. Indeed, they illustrate why so much soft-science (legal, software, white-collar process improvement, etc.) project management fails.

1. Does Legal Project Management Depend on Measurement and Process?

Measurement is a good thing, when done properly. Effective, low-NVA (non-value-added activity) processes are also good things. I firmly support both of them. I spend considerable time in my book Legal Project Management discussing both. My full-day courses and Master Classes, such as the one next month in Chicago, have a section on metrics and another on streamlining processes.

But LPM can be effective without either of these. Worse, tying the implementation of LPM to what you can easily measure, or to process improvement, is a recipe for doing a lot of ineffective work — and for putting your teams out of sorts without gaining ground on efficiency.

For example, in business there’s only one metric that truly matters — repurchase intent, often expressed as client retention in the legal world. Even the so-called ultimate metric, profitability, depends on repurchase intent when you look at a business over a term longer than a year or two. Yet repurchase intent is very hard to measure well.

Most easily measured project management metrics — adherence to schedule and budget, for example — are but superficially aligned with repurchase intent. For example, let’s say you set an unrealistically low budget, for whatever reason. If you drive the project such as to make that budget, you probably scrimp on exactly those hard-to-measure items that drive repurchase intent, such as quality.

In fact, quality itself is one of those measures that people strive for but rarely can measure directly. Industrial Six Sigma takes a whack at it in terms of defects per million, but even in industrial situations — which isn’t the legal world — it’s not that simple, especially in this disposable society that continues to flourish about us. In legal, measures of “quality” only sometimes align with repurchase intent.

While Legal Project Management of course is enhanced by good metrics and improved processes, it can succeed in their absence. Indeed, in their absence it may be even more imperative to introduce Legal Project Management. By using the simple tenets and principles of LPM, you can get project/matter teams aligned on goals. LPM builds a focus on repurchase intent, profitability, and a useful definition of “quality,” whether or not you have good measures of these variables. LPM removes or minimizes factors that create inefficient processes.

In other words, don’t wait to begin an LPM effort until you have your house in order — because in the crush of business, you’ll never get a disordered house in order. Rather, use Legal Project Management as the first step toward introducing order.

2. Must I Document the Work Before Thinking About Metrics?

No. The object isn’t to measure what you’re currently doing. The object is to measure results — in particular results that matter, such as repurchase intent/client retention and all-up project profitability.

There’s a memorable Gary Larson/Far Side cartoon that shows in the foreground a gaggle of geese walking in V-formation. In the distant sky are checkmark shapes representing geese flying in V-formation. One walking goose is looking up and exclaiming, “Look what they’re doing!” (I can’t find a link on line.)

If you document the work the foreground geese are doing, you’ll have a description of walking geese. Perhaps they walk at 2 miles per hour. Now work hard to improve those metrics, whether by putting the geese on a fowl treadmill or dangling succulent grass just ahead of them, and you may get them to walk at 2.2 MPH. Why, that’s a 10% improvement! Isn’t that wonderful!

But you’ll never get them flying by documenting and improving their walking. By the way, don’t step in the yucky stuff walking (but not flying) geese leave behind them.

Think about goals first. Where do you need to wind up? What does “Done” look like? What can I do to improve client retention and repurchase intent?

Then think about how (and whether) you can measure those goals, what you can do to attain them, how to share those goals across the team, and so on.

Once you’ve got it right, consider how you can pass it on to subsequent teams. That kind of documentation — which may not be a “document” at all — matters.

Knowing and understanding the current state is valuable. Documenting it is next to useless unless the current state is a good one — or you’re writing a book and need a “before” case study.

3. Does Management Buy-In Stem From Metrics?

Some managers say they manage by metrics. Outside the sales world, it’s rarely true. Good managers and leaders, intuitively or by training, understand the issues with substitute metrics, misaligned goals, partial measures, and the like.

Upper level managers look first for reasoned, convincing arguments. They need a vision of the imagined future, a high-level strategy, and the definition of at least a few initiatives that will get you there. On our family’s recent road trip, my daughter desperately wanted to see Mt. Rushmore (vision); we would drive east to get there from Seattle (strategy); and we would do so in legs of less than about 350 miles, we’d allow the kids to control the radio half the time, we’d do a mix of camping and hotel stays, etc. (initiatives). I didn’t really care about the exact distance to Mt. Rushmore, the specific roads we might take, etc.

Managers also know that metrics can be manipulated, especially in the early/buy-in phases of a project. No matter what they say, senior managers need more than metrics to buy into a project. Vision, strategy, and initiatives build that buy-in¹.

Metrics may — may — help finalize the deal, or at least show that you’ve got that base covered. But they won’t get you a hearing in themselves, let alone get the buy-in you seek. Even the most enticing bottom-line measure, such as profit before-and-after, can but whet their appetite; they are never the meal itself.

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¹I teach how to build these in my courses and Master Classes, too — they’re that important.

Here’s another observation from my recent road-trip vacation.

It seems that the more expensive the hotel, the more likely they’ll charge for Internet access. We spent half the nights tent camping, half in hotels. Every single campground we stayed at offered free Internet access. So did the inexpensive hotels. The mid- upscale hotels all charged for it, except for a Salt Lake City Residence Inn.

It’s annoying to be nickel-and-dimed for something that’s nearly free to supply. (Support does cost money, but access itself, spread across so many “guests,” is a minimal cost.) It would be like charging for towels, or pool access. I suppose it’s a good thing the airlines don’t run our nation’s hotel chains.

So are the economics upside down? Shouldn’t the inexpensive places charge for this service to bring their overall profits up, while the expensive places throw it in as a perk?

Obviously not; the entire hospitality industry doesn’t have it wrong. Rather, the low-end suppliers — camgrounds, EconoLodge, etc. — are competing in a very price-sensitive market where rooms or campsites are commodities and where small amenities such as heated pools or free WiFi can help close the sale. In addition, few people will pay $60 for a hotel room — we’re not talking New York here — and then shell out another $10-$15 for WiFi. However, people paying $300 for a night at a Hyatt, or expensing it, won’t notice another $15 for Internet access, or so goes the theory.

In Legalnomics terms, that’s the difference between commodity work and high-priced “bespoke” lawyering.

At the commodity end, clients want not just a flat price but a certain price. If they’re paying $X per page or per gigabyte for e-discovery processing, they expect an easily calculated total cost. The winners will be the firms — or outsourcers — that stick to that price, that don’t charge extra for WiFi, so to speak.

At the high end, firms have — until recently — had almost carte blanche to charge not just for time but for extras, from faxes to legal research to non-travel dinners.

Who Needs Hotel WiFi?

These days, when I check into a hotel that charges for WiFi, I usually hook up my cell phone to my computer, and I connect to the Internet through my phone. My data plan supports this at an (almost) reasonable rate, and while it’s not quite as convenient as hotel-based WiFi, it’s a lot cheaper. The speed is similar in most cities, too, although the number of iPhone data hogs on AT&T is hurting speed a bit these days.

It’s like the formerly ubiquitous $8-for-water mini-bars. Increasingly, guests resent the excessive charges and realize they have other options.

Read that last sentence again, this time with a minor substitution. Increasingly, guests clients resent the excessive charges and realize they have other options.

I can’t prescribe solutions for the hospitality industry, but I do know what this means for the legal industry. Think of it as a chain:

• Firms need to reel in these charges or risk alienating/losing clients.
• Thus firms need to find other ways to be highly profitable
• Thus firms need to understand exactly what does make them highly profitable (the difference between revenue and profit)
• And firms need to increase the efficiency (= profit) with which they deliver legal services.

Legal Project Management is about both efficiency and profitability. The techniques and tools of LPM offer significant opportunities for firms to realize efficiency without eviscerating profitability.

Are we at a tipping point for Legal Project Management, as some of my colleagues in this field have suggested? I don’t think so, not yet. But we may be at the tipping point for firm cost-efficiency, which is a precursor to that other tipping point¹.

Clients are tired of paying for WiFi at the high end. Wrap it into your charges.

The airlines are trying to eke out profits after years of losses, and so have little space for competitors to undercut their nickel-and-dime-and-$25-a-bag charges. Law firms aren’t in that situation, and clients know it.

If you can’t charge for WiFi², you need to figure out how to serve it up at low cost… and sell that as a benefit.

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¹Aside to Malcolm Gladwell: Are you frustrated yet at the overuse of this term you coined?

²By the way… I don’t think it will be long before clients add “no hotel WiFi charges” to their outside counsel guidelines.

I’ve been out of town for a time on a family road trip, with the attendant lack of posts. We saw elk, coyote, hot bubbling water, and cold falling water (a/k/a a ferocious rainstorm) in Yellowstone, saw Mt. Rushmore/Crazy Horse, swam in the Great Salt Yucky Lake, got depressed by Reno, watched a bear bathe in a nearby stream at Yosemite, experienced Mark Twain weather in San Francisco (“the coldest winter…”), and saw a mediocre production of Henry IV pt. 1 in Ashland, and did a whole bunch of driving — 4603 miles, to be exact. I think that equates to 9,206 bugs splattered on our windshield.

Gaming, Gambling, and Legal Project Management

The casino world insists that “gambling” be called “gaming,” trying to obscure the obvious — that the only sure winner is the house (the casino). Everyone else is tossing money away at various rates, with one oddball exception.

The laws of randomness are such that not everyone is on the negative side of the ledger all the time, especially when viewed through the short-term glasses of “this gambling session” or “this hour.”

Consider how that pattern is reflected in the context of legal efficiency. It’s certainly possible over the short term to be an inefficient project manager and do well against competing legal providers. Over the long term, however, you’re going to fall behind. Maybe you’ll have a huge spike in fees landing in your lap, just like the 1-in-38 chance that your number will come up in roulette. However, just as roulette pays off 36:1 for a 1:38 opportunity, most firms most of the time will be giving an advantage to the house, or in this case to their more efficient competitors.

The depressing part of Reno — and Vegas, etc. — is the number of people addicted to the machines and (perhaps less so) the tables. It would be one thing if they were joyous in their quest for the entertainment value and purported thrills of gambling, but the faces are almost uniformly slack.

Obviously, I’m a rationalist — I wouldn’t be in the project management business were I otherwise. I admit that I don’t “get” places like Reno and Vegas. I get no entertainment value in throwing money away in random patterns. My point is that I saw few others there who seemed like they were deriving entertainment either, let alone joy.

So if you don’t enjoy managing legal projects in a random manner, perhaps it’s time to get on the legal project management train. (Okay, a forced segue, but it’s my first day back at work….)

The one exception I noted above is poker, where you play against other players. The house takes a cut or fee, but it’s still possible for a good player to win regularly, since poker is as much about reading your opponents as it is about the cards you’re dealt. But there were hundreds of gamblers on the floor of the casinos we looked in on, between the don’t-have-slots-anymore slot machines and blackjack and roulette tables, but only five people — all with an astonishing collection of nervous tics trying to hide their “tells” — playing poker.

And no one playing baccarat in a tuxedo, which disappointed my wife, who’d previously seen casinos only in the movies.

Peter E. Cohan, on the Great Demo site, has a strong post about how groups respond after training. He breaks attendees into three groups:

1. Enthused, ready to make it work
2. Understanding but not truly committed
3. Rejecting, “if it ain’t broke….”

The insight isn’t new, but as usual Peter has a great way of clarifying the information and showing its practical implications.

If you’re looking into Legal Project Management training — or any practical, business-of-law training — take a look at Peter’s post. Then think about how you might use this information to inform the selection of candidates for your training program. A good manager can predict with reasonable accuracy how her reports will respond to training, considering both the instructional design and the subject matter.

I’m delivering a private session tomorrow on Legal Project Management. I saw an article this evening — it’s evening where I am right now — that ties right in.

One of the topics I almost always cover is the importance of vision. Not vision statements, which are overcrafted words that often amount to meaningless drivel, but vision itself. What’s the world look like when you’re Done? What’s the desired end state?

Too many people think, Who cares? What’s that have to do with Legal Project Management?

Well, it has everything to do with LPM, as I’ll explain tomorrow and whenever else I deliver these types of sessions. It seems hokey, but having a clear vision can make all the difference between success and indifferent failure.

Here’s the article, in TechnoLawyer: Why hasn’t Google been successful at anything besides search? YouTube doesn’t count for two reasons. First, it’s not making money, as far as anyone can tell. Second, it operates semi-autonomously outside the GooglePlex.

Google has a brilliant, memorable, crisp vision: ” to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Clear. Succinct. Easy for Googlers to relate to. Easy to test their work against.

So do it. Test their work against their vision.

Search? Check. Perfect fit.

YouTube? Pretty good. YouTubers — I love the couch-’tater implications in that term — often create said information seconds before they “organize” it, but nonetheless, it fits.

Google Checkout? Eek. If the information includes my credit card number, I don’t want them organizing it, let along making it universally accessible.

Google Apps? They’re not bad products at all¹, but what do they have to do with Google’s vision? One could make a convoluted case as to how they apply, but convoluted is the operative word.

Google Voice? Great app, but tell me again how that vision applies?

Android? Chrome? Buzz? (Anyone remember Buzz? Anyone actually know what it was supposed to be?)

During my first decade at Microsoft, the vision was “a computer on every desktop and in every home, running Microsoft software.” Clear, crisp, easy to work with. Windows? Check. Office? Check. Visual C? Enabling the developer community to write great software that made people need that Windows/Office ecosystem. IE? SQL Server? LanMan? (You remember LanMan? Really?) Even the much maligned Microsoft Bob fit that vision.

When I was working to create answers to the Netscape browser, it was clear how my work fit that vision, and it drove me night and day. When I ran a product and I saw a way that would boost Windows sales significantly even though it might cut my product’s revenue, there wasn’t a flicker of doubt that I should do what benefited the company even at the potential expense of my own revenue number. We didn’t recite the vision out loud every day like some sort of pledge of allegiance, but it was the standard against which we weighed our commercial actions. If it didn’t fit the vision, don’t do it. If it fit, go for it!

So when I tell you tomorrow or at some future seminar or on the web or in print that a vision really does matter, look at Microsoft (ca. 1989-1997) and Google (ca. 2005-2010). It really does matter. It’s not about words, but about setting direction.

Leaders set direction. Visions set direction. Project managers set direction.

Get aligned in the right direction. Have a clear vision.

Then hire committed, smart people and get out of their way.

Really. There’s the secret to business life. And it didn’t cost you anything. (Though if you profit from it, you might buy me a beer next time you see me.)

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¹Disclosure and disclaimer: Let’s just say I have an interesting relationship with this product, and leave it at that. My dog in this fight is a chihuahua, and a deceased chihuahua at that, but in the interest of full disclosure….

This article is part seven of a running series on the question How can you build a budget before you know the work involved?

I’ve covered five strategies likely to boost the success quotient: working in phases, using risk premiums, doing up-front analysis, turning the question around, and mining the wisdom of crowds.

Now I want to look briefly at a couple of strategies that are both common… and best avoided.

Bad Strategy #1: Guess

If you don’t know what it will cost, then you’ll have to guess, right?

There are all sorts of synonyms for “guess.” Project managers use “estimate” all the time, but too often for inexperienced PMs it’s a near-synonym for “guess.”

Technology has a variant on this term called a SWAG, which stands for “sophisticated wild-ass guess.”  I actually like this term, as long as everyone understands the acronym and remembers its final three words; it paints an accurate picture of the current state of budget knowledge.

“Estimate,” too, has meanings other than “guess.” At best, any cost projection is an estimate, since there is considerable variability even in the best projections. A budget, though, is not a cost projection, but rather a set of cost limits within which you expect portions of the project — phases, tasks, etc. – to live.

Thus a budget is a promise. It’s not a guess, not a projection, not an estimate. Occasionally it’s a promise that must be broken — a/k/a renegotiated — but that should normally happen only when circumstances have changed significantly from those under which you began the project. For example, if I’d asked someone to edit my book Legal Project Management based on my early projection of 225 printed pages, we would have agreed on a budget. However, when the actual book came in at 360+ pages (including front and back matter), I would have been the first to say, let’s rework the budget I gave you, because circumstances have changed materially.

And there’s a good use of the terms in that paragraph. My projection was an estimate, based on an early outline and two sample chapters. In truth, it was a SWAG, based on samples, an outline, and previous writing on different topics. The agreement to edit would have included a budget, or a cost/price agreement.

Likewise, the publisher might have given me a budget, a page budget in this example. I would either have had to conform one way or another (smaller print?) or renegotiate.

I’m not denying that there are times when you’ll have so little good data that you’re forced into working with a SWAG budget. However, before you accept that, consider the five strategies posited in the five previous articles in this series. Then, if you still  have more uncertainty that the parties are comfortable with, make sure that all of the caveats about the SWAG are written down and signed off by everyone involved in the money aspects — spending, receiving, or paying. And even then, expect there to be unhappiness down the line if the SWAG proves to have more of the “WA” part than the “S” part.

Bad Strategy #2: Overpromise and Underdeliver

Overpromise-and-underdeliver is a bad strategy for almost anything, but it’s especially undesirable when there’s money at stake. Everyone winds up with a bad taste in their mouths, along with vows to not work together in the future.

You can’t price in every single contingency. However, project budgets should contain a reasonable risk premium, as I’ve noted in articles elsewhere and in Legal Project Management.

This strategy might be called the Pointy-Haired Boss strategy, after the Dilbert manager who develops impractical product ideas and timelines and then expects his engineering staff to deliver them. As goofy as it may seem when you read Dilbert, remember that Scott Adams, a former telco engineer at PacBell, gets his ideas from the real world.

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This series will conclude with one more brief article on budgeting for something you’ve never done before.

(Updated to fix various typos.)

When I worked in radio 40 years ago, stations got news from the Associated Press (AP) and/or United Press International (UPI) over a teletype. It was all uppercase, and it was a learned skill — called “rip ‘n’ read” — to grab teletype copy just ahead of a newscast and read it a) without stumbling, especially over unfamiliar names and b) make it sound like you know what you were talking about.

When there was breaking news, the teletype would ring a series of bells — the more important the news (Armstrong walks on moon, e.g.), the greater the number of bells. Our ears were finely attuned to those bells, even though the teletype was invariably in another room behind a series of doors so listeners wouldn’t hear it clattering when you opened up the mic to talk. (And some of us did talk, in normal voices; I never did the screaming-over-the-record-intro DJ thing.¹)

Even at a relatively large regional station, there’d only be a couple of people around who had to keep an ear out for the ding-ding-ding that promised news someone thought important. And that was only in one business; in a market with, say, 20 radio stations, there might be only 30 people in the whole market who salivated when the bell rang.

Nowadays, entire office buildings full of people — tens of thousands of them — jump when the bell rings.

And it’s not even news anymore.

It’s conversations. Shared jokes. Requests. Solicitations. A few are important, but most are neither important nor urgent. Yet people jump when the EMail bell chimes.

Why?

Sure, once you set expectations you’re always ready to interrupt whatever you’re doing for incoming guided missives, it’s tricky to extricate yourself from these expectations. But you can do it. More importantly, when you enter a new environment, set expectations up front, either directly or via your actions, that you do not read or respond to EMail in “interrupt mode.”

There’s work, and there’s doing EMail, and they’re not the same thing.

So turn off the bell and flashing cursor. Close Outlook, or at least hide it behind another window. For sure turn off the blue ghost image — called a toast — that pops up at the lower right of your screen when an EMail arrives.

And ask not for whom the EMail bell tolls….

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¹By far the hardest thing such a DJ had to do — besides sound inane — was to talk up until the first word of the lyric was sung. Try it sometime; it’s much harder to do than you think. You have to know the record, have a feel for the beat and the music, and find stuff to say such that your last word is the conclusion of a full sentence. Nowadays I gather radio-station record — well, CD — releases actually print the intro time on the label; back then, you actually had to know the record. And if that sounds like an uphill-in-the-snow-both-ways plaint… well, I guess it is, young whippersnapper!

If you tried to reach me by mail between yesterday afternoon and this morning, you probably got a “bounce” message noting that my mailbox was full. A system error occurred that’s now been fixed, and I’ve taken steps to prevent its recurrence. (And I’ve locked the barn now that the horse has escaped.)

I apologize for any inconvenience, and I thank you for your understanding. Please feel free to resend anything you sent me after about 4PM EDT/1PM PDT.

Thanks.

(In re-reading this before posting, I find it mildly interesting that I wrote “mail” in the first sentence rather than “email.” I certainly do a lot more communicating by email than by physical mail. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a full physical mailbox.)