We can celebrate chat tools, Slack threads, and the return to in-person collaboration, but in most large, traditional organisations, email is still the system of record. Official statements, warnings, approvals, notifications, and anything that needs a defensible paper trail almost always arrive by email. If you want to stay in control of your work, you have to stay in control of your inbox.
Why email still matters
Email is the channel leaders fall back on when something must be traceable and unambiguous. “I’ve emailed you about this” is shorthand for “this is now formally on the record.” Lose grip on your email, and you lose grip on decisions, timelines, and, ultimately, credibility.
Signs you’re losing control
Only reachable on chat. People default to pinging you because email responses lag.
Meeting overload. When someone books meetings for everything and involves large numbers of people in these calls, it often means they can’t manage the information flow via email and so are having to get it repeated to them in person.
And, obviously, the fact that you have thousands, if not tens of thousands, of unread emails in your inbox.
These are symptoms of the same problem: your inbox is just overflowing.
If you can’t keep up, something must move
If maintaining your inbox feels impossible, don’t just keep drowning; make a change:
Get support. Ask for assistance with triage or admin.
Delegate other work. Free up time to handle essential communication.
Reduce optional involvement. Skip non-essential meetings to protect focus time, even if that triggers a little FOMO.
Set expectations. Tell stakeholders when you process email (e.g., twice daily) so they know when to expect replies.
Practical inbox habits that work
Thankfully one of my LDC Via colleagues, Matt White, has recently done a blog post on this and provided a good set of tips and ways of dealing with a heavy inbox.
Bottom line
Managers and subject-matter specialists who lose control of their email rarely have a happy work life; they’re permanently reactive. Whatever method you choose, treat your inbox like the operational cockpit it is. Stay on top of it, and your life will be a little less stressful.
This is one of my rare posts where I’m genuinely after feedback. to discover if I’m just being daft, or is this something more people quietly recognise?
When I’m dealing with tricky client situations or work I find stressful or dull, I gravitate to an office. If the client doesn’t have one, I’ll book a workspace. Making the environment more austere seems to make it easier to knuckle down 1. At home, when the work is unpleasant, I don’t tackle it as well; there are too many nice distractions. The difference between work I enjoy and work I don’t becomes stark, so I remove the comforts and go somewhere “all business”.
That’s my personal pattern. But is it generally true? Setting aside “people only work hard when monitored” (that’s a different debate), is difficult or unpleasant work simply more efficient to do in an office than at home?
It could explain a few things. You often hear aggressive, control-heavy managers say, “People work best in the office.” Well, if the work feels unpleasant, perhaps the lack of distractions helps you just get on with it. Conversely, inspiring leaders and organisations, where the work feels meaningful and motivating, may find remote working thrives, because people want to do the work and can benefit from less commuting and more flexibility.
Are we missing this nuance in the broader conversation? Perhaps some kinds of work , or some leadership cultures, make the office more effective precisely because the work feels less rewarding. If your only option in the office is to work, you might as well get it done.
Has anyone else seen this? Is this a conclusion you’ve come to? I’d love feedback, especially from engineers and delivery teams.
Note: I’m assuming all else is equal, same type of work, similar pay structure, and comparable teams. If the people or the work are fundamentally different, the comparison falls apart.
I have since learnt that part of this is the known effect that you work harder when you feel you are monitored[↩]
This is a relatively new pattern I’ve seen across vendors and clients, and it seems to track with the rise of strict, goal-based projects with fixed-prices and tighter costing controls. Contingency has seemingly “disappeared”, but the prices of the contract have not gone down, in fact, they tend to have gone up.
Here’s how it tends to play out.
In order to keep a firm grip on fixed-price spend and avoid variance on any given deliverable, the client or central finance team insists contingency is held centrally rather than on the vendor’s estimate. On paper, that’s fine: if something goes wrong, you dip into the central pot. In practice, two problems appear.
First, finance teams are often reluctant to release contingency. They treat requests as overspend or evidence of poor project management/implementation. People don’t like losing control or inviting blame, so approvals get sticky. Second, removing contingency from the vendor’s scope strips away whatever flexibility the vendor or delivery team might have to address issues quickly.
For as long as I can remember 1, there was usually a simple contingency line at the bottom of an estimate. It might have been in hours or a percentage, typically 10–20% (sometimes ~5% on a well-scoped waterfall project).
Now, many quotes simply cost about 20% more by default, and any challenge to time or scope turns into a long justification and a tussle over release of funds. Everyone knows the contingency hasn’t really gone; it’s just been moved and hidden. and that’s not much of a win for any of us.
The net effect is less transparency in our quotes and vendor interactions. If a project goes really well, we still “spend the contingency” because it’s already included in the bill. I’d much rather see contingency brought back as a clear line item. But while the push for ever-tighter fixed-price deliveries continues, I don’t expect that transparency to return any time soon.
This has been a recent learning for me. In my experience, there are two broad styles of project management:
The teeth-gritted, head-down “just get it done” approach.
The status heavy, constant updates, emails to stakeholders, meetings and escalation approach.
These camps tend not to like each other. I’ve spent most of my career firmly in the first: solve the problem, keep moving, minimal noise. That’s often exactly what clients want, a fix, quickly, with as little fuss as possible.
Historically, I saw the “status update” camp as unhelpful: lots of escalation, senior management getting dragged in, tempers frayed, and, in the end, someone still has to grit their teeth and fix the thing. But I’ve come to appreciate that they provide a vital function: awareness.
If you can resolve an issue quietly, without additional cost and with no material risk, then yes, get it done and move on. However, if the fix will incur more than minimal cost or expose the client to more than minimal risk, there must be full awareness. Simply generating noise isn’t useful; it just makes people anxious, but silence in the face of material impact is worse.
A competent manager does both. Do the head-down work to understand the problem and shape a solution. Once you have a plan, validated with subject-matter experts and the business, raise awareness calmly and clearly. Make stakeholders aware of the implications and the risks, alongside the proposed path to resolution.
A note for anyone hiring PMs: you want people who can do both. Perpetual flappers add little value. Perpetual silencers can cost you dearly over time. Aim for professionals who are strong on delivery and strong on communication. This isn’t an either/or. It’s both.
In the world of project management, we often focus on timelines, budgets, and stakeholder communication. However, there’s one critical skill that frequently gets overlooked:
The ability to do your own footwork and status checking. When you can independently investigate, gather insights, and verify information, you become far more effective in your role and less of a burden to your team.
As a project manager, you should be able to:
Track and raise issues and tickets with whatever system your client uses (ServiceNow or what have you).
Track sprints and work allocations in Jira (or any other tool) for any team, not just your own.
Review automated business process statuses (success or failure) after a new release goes live.
Understand logs at a high level, even if you’re not the one managing a system.
You might not need to dig into every technical detail (like sifting through Apache logs), but you should know where to look and what to look for.
Most modern project management and cloud-based tools offer robust logging, reporting, and monitoring features. If you have the right access, you can keep tabs on your project without constantly interrupting your team.
How Research Skills Make You a Better Leader
Stay Informed
Having the ability to quickly pull reports or check logs means you’ll have a real-time understanding of your project’s status. You’ll be the first to notice if something looks off, which gives you a chance to investigate further and proactively address issues.
Avoid Getting Deceived
When you rely solely on others to inform you of problems or progress, you risk missing critical details. By verifying information yourself, you’ll be much harder to mislead, intentionally or unintentionally.
Ask Better Questions
Instead of starting a daily stand-up or group chat with, “Where are we today?” do some quick research beforehand. This allows you to ask more targeted questions, which leads to more productive discussions and less frustration for everyone involved.
Earn Your Team’s Respect
Your project team members are often subject matter experts; they expect leadership that understands (at least on a basic level) how systems work. By showing that you can pull a quick report, interpret the data, and escalate issues properly, you’ll gain credibility.
Getting the Right Access
One of the biggest barriers to doing your own research is lack of access. If you’re unsure of how to proceed, follow these steps:
Request Reader Rights
Even if you can’t edit or contribute to certain systems, having reader rights allows you to see logs, ticket details, and reports. This is usually enough access to get an overview of what’s happening.
Learn Basic Navigation
Make sure you know how to navigate the tools your team uses: ServiceNow, Jira, etc. Practice pulling standard reports and locating the areas where jobs or tickets might be flagged.
Stay Updated
Tools change frequently, and new features are added all the time. Keep yourself updated on any new views, dashboards, or analytics that might help you monitor your projects more effectively.
Contributing During a Crisis
In critical situations, like a production outage, tensions run high. Instead of interrupting your team’s efforts to fix the issue:
Dive into the logs yourself.
Check job statuses, error messages, or recent updates so you can give higher-level managers real-time updates.
Consolidate Findings.
Summarise the situation for senior stakeholders, reducing the time your team spends reporting.
By doing so, you become a valuable contributor rather than an extra layer of overhead. You free up your technical experts to focus on solutions, while you handle stakeholder communication and status updates.
Final Thoughts
Doing your own research doesn’t mean you need to become a full-fledged developer or system administrator. However, by taking the initiative to learn basic investigative skills, you’ll:
Make more informed decisions.
Command greater respect from your team.
Present clearer updates to stakeholders.
Minimise downtime in a crisis.
Ultimately, self-sufficiency in information-gathering is a game-changer for any project manager. Challenge yourself to gain basic reader access in all key project tools, and practice using that access daily. The payoff in efficiency, respect, and overall project success will be well worth the effort.
