Email is your friend, not your enemy

A recurrent feature of any discussion about time management and working practices is the feeling that email is out of control; people say that they have to check it constantly and yet know that the old messages stack up, and they can never deal with it all. As a result, they say that if only they could handle the email mountain and have confidnce that they'd seen the important stuff, they'd be able to cope, leading to the desperate arbitrary expedients of 'email free Fridays' or 'no email after 3.00' rules.

This self-analysis may not, in fact, be accurate: an overflowing inbox may just be the symptom of a wider malaise. But since handling email forms such an important part of modern working, it is worthwhile thinking a little to get it right. Unfortunately, most of the problems come from other people, sending you stuff, but you can at least try to make life easier for your recipients.

WRITING EMAILS

Use the subject line

. . . to say what the subject is. The actual subject, preferably. Anything sent under a geenric heading, or [no subject], will be difficult to locate later when you're trying to find it. Don't use ALL CAPS, and start the subject with the key words.

It's often possible to put all the necessary info in the subject.
Not:

Subject: Re: Meeting tomorrow?



Text: Yes, 10am is fine.

But:

Subject: Meeting 10am ok



Text:

Email conversations tend to drift onto new topics; if this happens it's best to re-title messages periodically, rather than end up with:

Subject: re: re: re: re: re: re: Dinner tonight?



Text: Will you marry me?

For similar reasons, it's much easier to keep track of threads if you stick to one subject per email, so that if there are three issues you want to raise with someone, send three messages: this will allow them to respond to each on its own timeframe. Otherwise it's likely that only the first, or most urgent, issue will actually be addressed.

But there is an even more basic question: should you be writing an email at all? Email is great for short, quick, transient and non-controversial communication with people with whom you have an established relationship. It is not good for arguing, or explaining at length. A good rule of thumb is the 10/5 minute rule: if it will take longer than 10 minutes to write or 5 minutes to read, don't send it by email. Turn it into a Word dodument, or talk on the phone. Few people read long emails carefully, so don't expect them to.

Think hard before you use 'reply all' It is annoying to be copied into a two-sided debate in which you have no interest. Much better to have the debate in private and then circulate the conclusion to all.

If you are going to forward an email, it is helpful to add some sort of gloss: "Do you want to go to this conference?", "See the comment in para 2 which we might want to respond to", or even just a simple "any use?".

I would discourage the use of automatic read receipts. Somebody who has read the subject of an email, and decided to open it, is ready to read the contents, and the intrusion of a pop-up that they must read and click on before they can do so breaks the flow. There are a few occasions when a positive response is needed: I would just add a note in the text: "please confirm you've had this message".

In theory it should be possible to use priority markers (red text, !) to gain the reader's urgent attention to a particular message, but unfortunately these tend to be used only by spammers, and will therefore make people less likely to read it. Instead, start the subject line with "Urgent! "

Having a corporate signature text with phone number and a web address is a good idea. Having one which is bloated with legal disclaimers and vague threats against unintended recipients is a bad idea. Often these disclaimers are so broad that anyone wishing to conduct serious business would be justified in refusing to respond and insisting on dealing with someone whose word could be taken as some form of official sanction. It would be better to train staff in what they should say than to rely on these probably unenforceable clauses. Similarly, asking "do you really need to print this email?" may be ineffective. You could argue that the environmental impact of adding to the size of a message that has to be colelcted and stored by multiple recipients might outweigh the tiny number of trees saved by indecisive readers who were persuaded not to print it.

Don't apologise for cross-posting. The days when you only got messages you wanted have, alas, gone. Wasting everbyody's time by making them read this before getting to the substance is more annoying than getting the same message twice. But equally, don't circulate needlessly. Reading irrelevant emails can absorb an enormous amount of staff time, especially if they are labelled (unhelpfully) "Important notice to all staff" but in fact are of interest to three people in the organisation.

Finally there is the question of tone. It used to be common for people to treat email as if it were an electronic letter, written in the fairly stiff and formal language adopted in many businesses. Increasingly, though, it is coming to resemble speech, and it is hard to maintain that it should necessarliy be any more formal than would be used in, say, a telephone conversation. In general, peopel would rather recive an instant response, even if brief, slangy and mis-typed, than wait half an hour for one which said the same thing but in more coherent prose.

READING EMAILS

So maybe your readers will start being glad to get messages from you. But right now, that isn't really much help with your inbox. What can you do?

Break your messages up into folders. A good way is have folders for individuals or groups. When you're looking for an old message, you may have forgotten its subject or date but probably can remember or guess who had sent it.

Use message rules and filters. It is worth setting up rules so that new messages are moved straight into the relevant folder. You can then at a glance spot responses you were waiting for while leaving others to one side.

Have a folder for newsgroups. Those messages can go straight there and wait for your leisure; alternatively you can periodically use 'mark folder as read' so you can forget the rest. If the newsgroup has an acessible archive (as Jiscmail groups do), you can safely delete these messages en bloc.

Process your emails. Leave non-urgent unread messages in their folders. Scan the messages in the active folders, open the important ones, and respond to the simple ones straight away. Then go back and deal with the important complex ones. Whether you then go on to deal with the others is up to you, but you can be confident that you know about everything you need to for now.

Book proposal

I'm drawing up a book proposal at the moment:

Project Management for Archaeologists: A handbook

Contents

Introduction: archaeology and management

1 The archaeological manager
Ethics
Time management
Training and accreditation
Team leadership
Task management
Specialists

2 The project
Context Legislation and guidance
Documentation Briefs, specs, project designs, standards
Clients Contracts, meetings, reports, correspondence
Curators Roles, powers, styles
Fieldwork
Post-excavation and reporting
Publication
Archiving
Marketing


3 The responsibilities
Health and Safety
Employment law and administration


.. not sure whether to write it first or send the idea round to publishers.

The secret of painless downsizing

The secret of painless downsizing is that it is impossible. Even if done well, it is a negative, distracting, unsettling, upsetting and stressful experience, not just for those directly affected but for the whole organisation. Any downsizing will absorb enoroums amounts of unproductive time in meetings, paperwork, and gossip. If done badly, it will be all of this, and more, and still fail to solve the problems of the business. So what are they keys to doing it right?

Be open

Everybody involved will feel like shit. Those who suffer will blame you, the organisation, the profession, the economy, themselves. This is not the time to forget politeness, or play favourites. Information should be clear and shared transparently. How you behave can have a determining effect on how those who are made redundant feel about your organisation, and in general.

Planning ahead

Being bounced by a sudden crisis into taking snap decisions about staff is hardly the right approach. Well before things reach that stage, you should be looking at your core business area, at trends in the marketplace, and at your staff's skills. The temptation to keep going and hope for the best should be resisted.

Take the right action

Be as drastic as you need to be. Wishful thinking isn't a business strategy, so you may have to close down entire teams or operations. What you don't want to do is have successive rounds of cuts because you couldn't face them at first.

Keep the right people

Ideally, you should have a forward plan, of how your core business will survive and in due course grow again. This should define what people you need to keep: their value to you now, and in the future, rather than in the past.

Be fair

Last in first out is a clear system: at least people know who is at risk. But it isn't likely to be the best way of deciding who best fits your business needs. Any alternative needs to be fair and transparent: this is not a chance to get rid of the people who have annoyed you at some point in the past. This is hard work, but essential. If moral arguments aren't enough, maybe the prospect of an employment tribunal would help.

Look after your leavers

It's not their fault. You should do everything you can to smooth their transition, to find new jobs, providing references. They will be talking about your organisation wherever they go: what will they be saying?

The archaeological marketplace

In times like these, effective marketing can make all the difference between survival and closure. Does your current strategy deliver business? Or are you wasting time and money?

If you're relying on repeat business from your existing developers, you will starve

There were 4,500 developer-funded reports per year sent to HERs in England before the credit crunch (source: Archaeological Investigations Project)
There were 500,000 planning applications per year (source: Planning Portal)

So, on average, 1 in 100 planning applications leads to archaeological work of some sort. So even if a developer is highly active and submits a lot of applications, they are unlikely to need archaeological assistance more than once in a blue moon.*

If you're relying on word-of-mouth you will starve

Developers don't talk to each other very much, and certainly don't share their commercial secrets. They won't recommend you to their competitors. And in any case, given the low incidence of archaeology, it won't be often that someone who has had a problem meets someone who has got one at the moment.

If you're relying on your reputation you will starve

You can't rest on your laurels and wait for work to turn up based on your reputation. The only archaeologists likely to be recognised outside the archaeological community are Time Team (and maybe Bonekickers).

Every project is a first date

You need to make a good first impression. It's no good muddling along and then producing the best report in the world at the end: they won't hang around. But managing that impression is difficult.

What will be noticed
Price
Answering emails and phone calls quickly and politely
Having professional-looking stationery, staff and premises
Professional and quality accreditation
Friendliness, enthusiasm and efficiency
What curators say about you

What won't be noticed
Academic credibility
Specialist knowledge
Previous experience
What past customers say about you

I man ways, this is depressing, since it means that the qulaities we value highest are least effective. But it's probably better to realise that, I think.



* Environmental Assessments are different: developers for types of development that require these *will* be repeat customers and *will* know about archaeology.

Training without a training budget

It may seem a bad time for the IfA to be promoting CPD, when for once there really is a rational case for reducing expenditure on training. But much of the entrenched (ho ho) opposition to compulsory CPD schemes over the years has been the result of a misconception that CPD must mean training and training must mean formal expensive courses. For some topics that may be the case, but there is a great deal of value to the individuals and the organisation that can be done at little or no cost.


Sharing expertise

Do all your field staff recognise finds? If not, it would be well worthwile spending an afternoon looking at local pottery types, clay pipe, animal bone, glass. Many recent graduates may have had little opportunity to handle material and learn the diagnostic features.

Make sure everybody in the organisation takes decent photos: this may involve looking at the various cameras you use and what the options mean. Perhaps more importantly, it is a chance to discuss why we take photos and what use they are. It is depressing to think quite how many hours have been spent over the last two decades taking multiple poor photographs of uninteresting features which have each been carefully catalgued and archived.

Most organisations have people working in silos: they may have adjoining offices but have no idea at all what other people do or why. Get them to explain their role. Quite apart from anything else, it's good practice in giving presentations.

Talk about project costings. These shouldn't be mysterious: an understanding of how they are done, and what they eman, may well have an immediate pay-off in attitudes and behaviour, once they realise quite how much money goes on plant hire.

Also, it's easy for organisations to forget that new staff don't know the history: it would be useful for them to know a little about why it was set up, what its major projects have been.

And one thing you can't do enough of is discussing grammar and layout and the real nitty-gritty of report writing.


Goal-orientated learning

Arcaheologists have a long and honourable tradition of teaching themselves new stuff when they need to. This is particularly true of software. Over the last year I have picked up some html, xml, wiki formatting, Powerpoint design, and print-on-demand publishing, because, in each case, I needed or wanted to achive something and so had to work out how to do it. It's true that this reactive type of learning is hard to fit within the CPD framework, although it is possible to some extent to predict areas you might want to develop.


Updating knowledge

Unlike a lot of things for which training is expensive, gathering archaeological information, on developments in Mesolithic studies or Roman urban sites, is free or cheap. Read some books and journals; go to a talk or two. These are real and worthwhile learning activities and, who knows, may even make you better at your job.



With a little imiagination, it's possible to carry out a transfomative training porgramme across an organisation without ever having to write a hundred-pound cheque to an 'expert'.

Hard time economics

Any doubt about the impact of the recession on commercial archaeology has been removed by the recent IFA/FAME report on Job Losses in Archaeology. Depressingly, this news has already led to the re-emergence of rhetoric about cowboy contractors and dodgy freelances. It is sad that archaeologists instinctively think that any organisation that operates more cheaply than them must be transgressing established standards of practice, when these are probably the least threatened area.

It is worth thinking, though, about what a mature commercial archaeology industry would look like. The starting point must surely be that a unit should conduct its main operations within, say, one hour travelling time from its base. It can make no sense in the long term for field teams to commute or live in accommodation: either that becomes very expensive (if those involved are properly compensated), or very demoralising (if they aren't). The logic of 'super units' like Wessex and Oxford is debatable. From the starting point of a unit covering a radius of 30-50 miles, you can work out how much archaeological work can be expected, and therefore how many staff are needed. If the current capacity is more than the work available, the unit is unsustainable even in times of high economic activity.

One question that seems mystifying to many diggers is how one-man-bands (OMBs) and freelances can undercut established units. Maybe they do turn up on site in sparkling new 4x4s and use gold-plated trowels, or maybe they don't.

What the successful ones do is:
* work hard - not 8 hours a day, 10 or 12 (office work gets done in the evenings)
* limit overheads - minimal office staff
* cost carefully
* work locally
* know their area well
* don't pay themselves much

There will always be a market for OMBs alongside larger units. OMBs offer personal service and cheapness: to compete, units need to offer something more, in terms of reliability, range of skills, track record, professionalism and scale. Some clients will go for the certainty of outcome of an established unit; others will take a risk. Perhaps the hardest thing for OMBs to handle is contingencies: if a minor watching brief suddenly turns into a Roman cemetery excavation, where can they find a digging and specialist team to deploy in a hurry? Having said that, units might have problems responding too, but since they have more than one project at once there is at least the possibility of switching resources when needed.

The real problem for unit faced with a drop in workload is cutting back. The idea that less digging means fewer diggers is one that most managers can grasp. But unless overhead costs are reduced, they will become ever more disproportionate as the volume of work drops.

How to cut overheads

There are no painless cuts. Archaeologists expect admin support, facilities, and management. Hard luck: they may be luxuries.

As turnover drops, the ability to resource secretarial and administrative support shrinks. Because archaeologists don't pay themselves very much, it is often cheaper to get them to do this work. There was a time when the hassle of sending faxes, typing letters and routing phone calls was a distraction for archaeological staff, and it therefore made sense to employ office staff to handle them, but perhaps these days with email and mobile phones that is no longer true. Most units are stuck in an 80s organisational model of who does what.

One of the problems with project work is that the team involved pays little attention to the wider organisation: it's 'just there'. 'Why aren't there any more context sheets?', people ask, not expecting the answer 'Because you didn't get any more printed.' Tools, PPE, cameras, surveying equipment, vehicles, finds bags, computers: it's all stuff that someone has to resource. It may well be that the stock of material cannot be maintained, and projects may end up having to cost for new purchases instead. This may be wasteful and expensive, but it does have the benefit of forcing managers to consider the full historic cost of their work ratehr than the incremental costs.

Cutting management costs is hard, partly because this is managers deciding to put themselves out of a job. But it is worth thinking from scratch: how large does an organisation have to be until it can support a chief executive who undertakes no chargeable work? It depends how much they get paid, of course. But most unit are top-heavy with not one but several senior managers. This may have been sustainable in the days of large project volume, but if the volume goes down, it isn't any more. Not that they need to be sacked, but they do need to change their work pattern so that they carry out their management tasks in gaps between chargeable work.

Finally, it must be faced that many of the things that units like to do may not be possible: outreach events, open days, conferences may have to be dropped unless they come attached to their own income streams.

It is interesting to note that these measures would make units much more similar to the OMBs.



Update

A longer article based on this post was published in The Archaeologist 71 (2009) now available as a pdf


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The power of the self-talk

Modesty and self-deprecation are instinctive and engrained, even in managers. This may be particularly true in Britain, where being proud of something is considered to run perilously close to being conceited or arrogant, but it probably universal. Less universal, though, is the inability to take a compliment. I think it is reasonable that when somebody has decided to praise you, you are allowed to say " thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed the talk", not "aw shucks, it was nothing". Reasonable, yes, but easy to do, no.

But perhaps social self-doubt has its role in preserving relationships; unfortunately it often is mirrored by internal self-doubt, the monologue that says "this meeting's going to be hard, you're never very good at this, see, what did I tell you?, it'll be worse next time ...". As a result, it's all too easy to lose sight of the things you can do well, and to miss the chance to bask for a while in the satisfaction of achievement. For a course I was on recently we had to spend five minutes writing in our journals about three things we were good at. It really was hard to break out of the bonds of modesty, and felt completely unnatural. It was very useful, though, to remind us that, yes, we were ok, we weren't necessarily in crisis mode all the time. I cannot remember the last time I had thought along these lines, looking at the positives; self-criticism is a hard habit to break (not that it doesn't have its place, but it's unhealthy as the only mode of thought).

My suggested adaptation is this: write down three headings:
* a skill you have, something you are good at
* your greatest achievement
* the event or person that has changed you most

Think for a minute, then write soemthing down for each heading. You're not deciding your answers for ever; maybe tomorrow you'd choose other examples. What you should be doing is 1, reminding yourself what is important to you and how you have been effective; and 2, practising positive self-analysis that should assist you in understanding your own motivation, values and goals.

It sound silly, but it works.