One day a friend asked me how work was going and I replied, “death by email.” It was accurate in that I was spending around half of my day writing emails to clients about their projects and hating it. Eventually, we closed out those projects and things slowed again, but before I knew it, I found myself giving the “death by email” update to someone else. Unfortunately, this phrase begin to become more and more frequent to the point where some days I would stare out the window and mutter it like a lunatic. It was my little psychotic mantra.
Some people like writing emails. Idiots for example. (Ha!) However, I had better things to be doing and I was wasting my time in my inbox. On the other hand, those emails were essential. Communication had to occur in order for the projects to move forward. There was no getting around the need to email back and forth in order to get and keep things progressing.
When I set aside the time to think about it, I realized that it wasn’t the emails that were the problem. The problem was that we had become more successful in landing projects. Additionally, because web development is often an ongoing need, we were continuing to get new projects from our previous clients. All this incoming work required more and more project management and email just happened to be the medium through which I was doing it. However, there wasn’t more and more of me. While I was good at managing projects by necessity and experience, it wasn’t something I enjoyed, and it prevented me from actually moving things forward. Continue reading