A brief guide to handling teacher emails

In my book ‘the elephant in the staffroom’ I briefly mentioned dealing with email, citing one interesting statistic from John Freeman’s that American corporate workers spend up to 40% of the day dealing with email; it may well be higher given almost ten years have passed since the study. Teachers have frequently been promised that technology will simplify their lives; it rarely does and email has almost certainly increased workload. I suspect that if, as in the old days, you had to walk the length of a school building to communicate what was in the email, many messages just wouldn't get sent.

I have thought a lot over the years about the teacher’s relationship with email and would like to extend my thoughts.

First, email is almost always a disruption.

Email is a problem because it almost always interrupts something else - often something more important

– You are in the middle of a lesson and you get an email reminding you of something you haven’t done.

– You are productively working through your to do list in the office/staffroom when emails keep pinging – you just check because it may be important.

– You are sitting down to watch TV with your family and an email arrives at your device. Your mind is transported back to work.

Email is always a distraction from the thing that you are actually doing at the time. We rarely sit down and decide that our number one priority, the thing we are really working on at the minute, is answering email. So when an email pings in it stops us from what we are actually doing. How can we prevents email from wrecking our efficiency?

So here's a few tips and thoughts gathered over the years often by making mistakes

1. Like all other addictions try cutting down first. Check email first thing in the morning and at the end of the day. And perhaps at lunchtime if you really must. That way you package your email time together.

2. Turn off email when teaching- don’t set a precedent of being constantly available and more importantly it is not fair on the class you are teaching. They need your full attention. This sometimes provides another benefit - if you stay out of an email thread for long enough, you often find that the person in question has resolved the issue without you.

3. One of the reasons we feel we need to answer emails immediately is that we worry about forgetting them. In order to avoid this, create a ‘deal with me’ folder (or star them in gmail) and move important/urgent emails to it so you don’t forget them. Deal with them when you have time.

4. Try to avoid email out of hours. If you do read them you don’t have to reply. Model work-life balance to staff and students; in some cases waiting will mean you give a better and calmer response. When I received an evening email from a senior colleague that annoyed me. It was tempting to fire off an angry reply. By the morning I had decided he was mostly right and was able to respond more logically.

5. Think about others. Don’t send email after hours or at weekends. If you are tempted to email, use timed delivery or press save. I frequently draft emails on Sunday, save them and schedule them for first thing Monday morning. Yes, you have a right to work at the hours you choose, but unless it's an emergency, don't contact your colleague who, perhaps out of anxiety, is constantly checking their phone. Sometimes we have to protect our colleagues from themselves.

6. ... And don't have your work email on your phone. You will keep checking (it's an addiction). Switch off.

7. Be polite. I have a friend who is a Deputy Head in a secondary school. He operates by the rule that if an email asking for something doesn’t contain a please or a thank you, then he ignores it. I've never quite had the courage to do this but I rather like it as a principle.

8. Email is not always the right medium: One of the dangers of email is that it is quick and easy. Sometimes busyness or plain cowardice has meant that I have pinged an email on an important issue when a conversation would have been better. Some things are too important to risk the misunderstanding of tone and nuance that email brings.

BONUS : The other great interrupter is the staffroom telephone. A typical phone conversation in the staffroom involves the phrase ‘no, he/she’s teaching, can I take a message?’ I’m not sure what people think teachers are doing all day! (perhaps there is a clue in the word ‘teacher’) It is interesting that one difference between teaching and other professions is that people’s lunch breaks are sacred in most jobs. How often do you ring an office to be told ‘Sorry, X is on lunch.’ Yet often in teaching phone callers get told ‘X is teaching. They have lunch at 12pm. Ring back then.’ Let’s stop dropping each other in it and actually respect each others lunch breaks.