Striving for Excellence: Applying Jim Collins’ Good is the Enemy of Great to
Email Management
by Michael Hoffman
When it comes to managing email, you’re probably already quite proficient at keeping your inbox organized. However, “pretty good” isn’t sufficient in high-stakes environments like the court, the diamond, the rink, the field, or the concert hall. So why should “pretty good” be acceptable when it comes to your email management, especially when it impacts your colleagues and customers?
Jim Collins’s “Good is the Enemy of Great” theory, presented in his book “Good to Great” posits that the primary barrier to achieving excellence is settling for mediocrity. According to Collins, many organizations and individuals fail to reach their full potential because they become complacent with being “good” rather than striving to be “great.” This concept is driven by the idea that achieving greatness requires a relentless pursuit of excellence, disciplined people, disciplined thought, and disciplined action.
Relating this theory to how people manage email, we can draw several parallels:
- Complacency with Inefficient Practices: Many people are content with their current email management practices, even if they are inefficient. They might use basic sorting and occasional cleanups, but they don’t strive to implement best practices that could significantly improve their productivity and reduce email-related stress.
- Lack of Proactive Management: Good email management might involve simply keeping the inbox from overflowing, but great email management involves setting up systems that prevent clutter, prioritize important messages, and streamline responses. This could include techniques like the LeanMail method, which emphasizes sorting emails by importance and urgency, rather than just responding to emails as they come in.
- Failure to Utilize Tools and Strategies: Many people do not take advantage of available tools and strategies that can make email management more effective. Settling for the default email setup without exploring features like filters, folders, or email add-ins can keep them in the “good” category. Striving for greatness might mean learning and integrating these tools to automate and optimize email handling.
- Discipline and Consistency: Great email management requires disciplined habits, such as regularly scheduled times for checking and processing emails, maintaining a zero-inbox policy, and setting clear boundaries for email response times. People often lack this discipline, which keeps them in the realm of merely good practices.
By applying Collins’s theory, individuals and organizations can recognize that being satisfied with “good enough” email management is a barrier to achieving peak productivity and efficiency. Striving for “great” involves continuous improvement, adopting best practices, and a commitment to disciplined action in managing email workflows.
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