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How fast should you respond to an email? I think there’s a sweet spot between too-fast and too-slow. Here’s what I mean – I call it the Pizza Rule.

If you’re making a pizza, and you eat a slice as soon as it’s out of the oven, you’ll burn your mouth, and you won’t be able to enjoy the pizza’s taste. On the other hand, if you wait until the pizza isn’t hot any more, it won’t be as good.

Similarly, if you reply to all email immediately, you’ll spend a lot more time total on it. Ultimately, you’ll have little time for anything else. We aren’t in the email-answering business – we have other places to be!

If you reply to email too slowly, though, you’ll suffer a variety of consequences, from disappointed constituents to time-consuming interruptions.

The key is to answer within the sweet spot – in other words, to eat your pizza while it’s still hot, but not too hot.

I think the sweet spot varies for different people and different audiences, but for me, it’s usually somewhere between 4 and 20 hours. Any less, and email becomes a nervous habit; any more, and the work doesn’t get done.

At this point, you might be wondering “Why isn’t it faster to answer email right away?” There are several reasons:

• Many emails contain ambiguities or errors that will be corrected in short order by others. You don’t always need to be the one to point out or ask about these issues. (The most common one I see is when someone proposes a date and day of the week that don’t match, like “Friday, October 22″ when Friday is really the 21st.)
• If you reply immediately, other people will reciprocate, and you’ll consequently engage in more back-and-forth chats throughout the day. This essentially turns email into an instant messenger (IM), which it isn’t meant to be. If people need to reach you immediately, they can pick up the phone and call you.
• Taking a bit of time to think about an issue can make it easier to respond later, especially if it’s an emotionally tough issue to deal with.

Similarly, taking too long to reply to email can waste your time, too:

• If you’re slow to reply, people will find more reliable and time-consuming ways to reach you, such as seeking you out in person. While it might only take 30 seconds to reply to an email, if someone has to wait two days for your response, they may track you down, and you’ll end up with a 5-minute conversation instead. Aside from the inefficiency, it’s unpleasant (and unprofessional) to leave people waiting.
• If a group email has seen too much discussion, it may be hard to weigh in definitively without responding to all of the points that have been raised; an earlier email could have determined a reasonable course of action with less discussion.

The bottom line? Find your sweet spot, and answer in that timeframe.

Apollo astronauts made it to the moon with this. They handled the complexities of traveling hundreds of thousands of miles through the cold vacuum of space, landing on the surface of the moon, and making it back again – without iPads, without apps, without the magic we’ve grown accustomed to.

Our work is complex, just as their work was complex, but complexity can be handled.

We handle complexity by making it simple – by reducing the number of decisions we have to make, and refusing to treat every situation as totally unique.

What are the patterns in your work that can help you manage its complexity? What are the recurring challenges, and the most effective solutions?

Answer these questions, and you’ll be well on your way to wrangling the complexity of your daily work.

I signed up to participate in No Office Day, a great initiative to get school leaders to spend an entire day in classrooms and other public spaces rather than the office. I first heard of the concept via Twitter, from @dwight_carter and @datruss.

So far, I’ve failed twice this week to spend a full day out of the office, in both cases because I agreed to meet with people and realized that I had pressing tasks to complete in the office.

I’ll try again tomorrow, and of course, I make an effort every day to spend as little time as possible behind my office door. Being a leader requires being “visible,” and building relationships with students, staff, and families. It’s great to have a day to celebrate and demonstrate the importance of being “out and about” on campus, and to remind ourselves that instructional leadership demands that we spend real time in classrooms.

But No Office Day also helped me appreciate the fact that supporting and advancing the work of my school requires me to do certain things in the office. This is especially true at the beginning of the year, when we’re still ironing out all the startup issues and ensuring that everyone has what they need. Picking up the phone and reaching the right person at the right time can be invaluable, and there are times when answering email quickly is essential, even during the school day.

Of course, the way most of us handle this challenge is to do as much office work as possible outside of school hours, and that’s certainly my goal. Striving for Inbox Zero each evening is one way to set a goal for myself in this area, and to ensure that I’m doing as little office work as possible during the school day.

Here’s a list of blog posts by other No Office Day participants. What was your experience?

I’d love to interview three or four people for the next episode of Eduleadership Radio, which has been delayed due to certain obligations on my plate at the moment (such as, you know, starting the school year). If you’re interested, drop me a line at info@eduleadership.org or on Twitter at @eduleadership. Please include your Skype username or phone number (preferably a landline). The discussion will take place on Tuesday, September 20 at 7PM Pacific time.

August 31 is the last day to participate in our first-ever “crowdsourced” project to share the best ideas in professional practice. Our discussion on starting the school year with staff has 54 replies at the moment, and if we reach 100 participants by midnight on the 31st, we’ll give away an iPad 2 to one participant drawn at random.

If not, we’ll start a new discussion topic and try again for 100 respondents. People who participate in both discussions will be entered in the drawing twice, and the original entries are still valid.

The part I’m most excited about (since I can’t win the iPad 2) is what comes after the discussion deadline passes: We’ll create our first-ever Best Practice Guide, which will be a downloadable document distilling the best ideas submitted by our members. We’ll of course leave the discussion up so people can continue to share ideas, but we’ll also create a PDF that concisely describes the best ideas submitted in the discussion.

So, if you haven’t been keeping up with the discussion so far and don’t have time to read 50-100 discussion posts, don’t despair – just look for the Best Practice Guide on Starting the School Year with Staff in the next few days. It’ll be short, helpful, and fully attributed, so if you want to contact someone to learn more about their idea, you’ll be able to do so through The Principal Center.

If you haven’t added your voice to the discussion about starting the school year with staff, please do! Your ideas can make all the difference for a colleague.

To join The Principal Center, enter your email address at www.PrincipalCenter.com and invite other school leaders (including APs/VPs, deans, principal interns, and central office leaders). When 3 people that you’ve invited have signed up, you can email me at info@eduleadership.org to request your Private Beta account. Private Beta members will receive free lifetime membership (the rate for new members will be $120/yr after the private beta ends).