Trust your staff to solve workflow problems.

Eliminating bottlenecks requires communicating with, empowering staff.

Last September, when associate editor Tom Still told me I was in charge of figuring out how we would start getting letters to the editor via e-mail, I almost went postal on him.

"We" - our two-person editorial page staff - were having enough trouble getting good old "snail mail" letters into the paper in a timely matter. The last thing we needed was e-mail - especially since our computer system does not allow us to get e-mail at our personal computers. (More on that problem later.)

First, I identified the bottlenecks in our existing snail mail system. The way it worked was, all the 60-plus letters we receive per day were opened by Dody Emington, the office coordinator. Dody sorted the letters into "yes" and "no" piles, did preliminary paper editing on the "yesses," and put both piles into Bottleneck No. 1: the in-basket.

Everything else - interoffice memos, unintelligible missives from personnel, freelance submissions, canned op-ed pieces, innumerable press releases, and a thick stack of journals like the Free China Review - went into the in-basket at the same time. The size of the pile was so daunting, we would sometimes ignore it for days at a time. By the time we excavated the letters to review Dody's work, too many were already out-of-date.

It took some weeding and cajoling, but I finally persuaded Tom to cut the in-basket out of the letters loop altogether. Dody would give the rejects to us for review, but send the "yesses" directly to Chris, the inputter. Tom was initially unsure Dody had the ability to decide which letters we should use, but his doubts were unfounded.

Chris was Bottleneck No. 2. Because of her other duties, she can only input for us on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday afternoons, and often had an enormous backlog. Other days she would wander over just as we were on deadline, asking if we had anything for her to do. That meant stopping whatever we were doing and tackling the dreaded in-basket.

Eliminating Bottleneck No. 1 helped enormously by giving her a smooth flow of letters to work on. Also, by talking to her, I learned that typed letters scanned better if they hadn't been written on (which made Dody's job easier) - and Chris also informed me rather archly that she knew enough about newspaper style to edit them herself once they were in the computer system. She turned out to be right. These changes helped us get an unprecedented number of letters and guest columns in during the weeks preceding the fall election.

As for e-mail, we're still working on it. Thanks to the NCEW Internet seminar I attended in conjunction with the Baltimore convention, I conquered my fear of the big research computer where we receive e-mail. It still takes a good half-hour to trudge over to the machine, retrieve the letters on a disk, take the disk over to the inputter's personal computer, and transfer the e-mail into the editor directory - and often, an extra half-hour is hard to find on a two-person staff But Tom has promised to try persuading the company that we need to get e-mail at our desks.

He'll be successful if he can persuade the honchos to trust us. That's the key. Trusting Dody's and Chris's ability to take on more responsibility for letters accounts for all the progress we've made so far.

NCEW member Sunny Schubert is an editorial writer for the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison.