Taking back control of my inbox

I had struggled for years with my Outlook inbox at work. I often had a couple of hundred emails in there that needed action, and usually more than 50 of those were unread at any one time. However, last week, as I left the office on Friday, I had just one email in my inbox. ONE EMAIL. It felt amazing.

I’ve been making various iterations to the way I use email over the past couple of years to help stop it being such a drain on my energy, attention and time. All the changes have had subtle benefits, but I never got anywhere near to achieving inbox zero. However, three things happened at the start of last week that had a massive impact.

Email processing tips from The Productivity Show

Firstly, I listened to an episode of The Productivity Show podcast about how to handle any email in your inbox. This was the second or third thing by the Asian Efficiency team that I had listened to or read on the topic of email, and it finally all clicked into place. I highly recommend you spend an hour listening to this podcast if you too want to feel less burdened by email. It’s full of practical, actionable advice, and powerful ways of thinking about email, such as:

Your inbox is a to-do list that other people can write on.

That is so true. We can’t be productive if we’re looking at, or being interrupted by, our inbox all day long. I have a to-do list, but it is not my Outlook inbox, and is not less important than my Outlook inbox. Which brings me round to the second thing that helped me this week.

Jocelyn K. Glei’s three tips

I read Jocelyn K. Glei’s three tips to make email less of a time-suck. Why even have Outlook open while I’m working on something? How often do I really need to check my inbox? Jocelyn makes a startling point about how deleterious this apparently innocuous task can be:

Every time you stop to check your email, you incur a “switching cost,” or roughly 25 minutes of time that it takes to get back on task.

So, next time I consider a quick ALT+TAB to look at my inbox half way through a task, I’ll think twice.

Reversing the order of the inbox

Thirdly, and possibly most powerfully, I reordered my inbox. This wasn’t something I’d read or heard about, but it just struck me that it would help me implement some of the ideas I’d learnt about. Instead of the newest emails at the top, I reversed the order, putting the oldest emails at the top.

On the face of it, this was such a simple thing it hardly seems worth writing about it. But I’ve now realised how powerful the order of my inbox is. Having the newest emails at the top of my Outlook inbox was actually one of the main factors in my email problem remaining a problem. The day I reversed the order was the most productive day I’ve had for ages.

Now, if I’m tempted to check for new emails, the physical act of having to scroll down past the older emails makes me think twice. Do I really need to check for new emails right now? Often the answer is no, so I don’t scroll.

In reality, I’m unlikely to miss anything urgent even if I’m not checking my inbox several times an hour. I’ve got all Outlook alerts for new emails disabled on my laptop so I can work without routine emails interrupting my flow. But my work phone will ping if I get an email from one of my superiors. So I’m not totally out of touch.

How do I add value to the organisation? Is it by reading, organising and responding to emails?

Feeling less fettered by my email inbox helps me focus more on my objectives, and what I’m actually employed to do. A Twitter conversation involving Vincent Vukovic in 2016 helped me think afresh about how I add value to the organisation, and how it is unlikely to be by replying promptly to every email in my inbox.

The act of seeing, and dealing with, the oldest emails first is similar to another technique I’ve previously tried: the yesterbox principle. This involves not looking at today’s emails until yesterday’s are taken care of. After all, the sooner you reply to an email, the sooner there will be yet another one to reply to. The trouble I had with this principle in the past is that I often needed to think more in terms of lastweekbox or even lastmonthbox before the luxury of getting to yesterday’s emails.

I’ve made a few other changes to the way I use email, such as trying to be more succinct in emails, limiting emails to five sentences or less. There are variations on this principle you can adapt to your own needs, based on three, or four sentences. But the general idea is, if you can’t say it in five sentences or less, perhaps email is not the right channel. I must admit, I haven’t fully mastered this one yet.

Changing our email culture one person at a time, starting with me

Earlier this year I confessed to colleagues that I was struggling, feeling overwhelmed by the volume of emails I was getting. I asked for patience if people were waiting for a reply. I asked that people might consider phoning me instead if they wanted a quick response. I’m also trying to move more of our communication away from email and into Slack. But this takes time, and there is inevitably cultural resistance within an organisation to changes in the way we communicate.

After I opened up and said I was drowning in emails and unable to keep up, it was suggested to me that perhaps the problem wasn’t the number of emails I was getting, but perhaps the problem was my own email management practices.

After a period of indignation and self-pity, I started to wonder if there was some truth in what had been said. Perhaps there were habits of my own I could change. Perhaps if I reviewed and refined my own email habits, I would be in a better position to suggest ways other people could improve their own productivity. I had failed to change other people’s email behaviour by entreaty, so I decided to try changing our email culture one person at a time, starting with myself.

I was impressed to learn that Rarely Impossible banned all internal email and increased productivity as a result. This is evidence that it is possible to be more productive by reducing email. It’s not simply down to individuals to get quicker at dealing with the deluge. Lisa Gill points out that the very technology that was designed to enable us is now drowning us.

Is email the problem or are we?

As Dyfrig Williams points out, a lot of the problems that come with email are down to us as users. Yes email does have major flaws as a tool. For example, there is a lot of value locked up in our private inboxes, and group conversations by email are inefficient and often fragmented.

But while email is not the best communications tool in a lot of instances, we need to look at ourselves and how we communicate. Unless we properly identify the problem, we won’t get to a satisfactory solution. There is little point just switching between different tools and channels hoping one will offer a panacea.

Is there simply too much communication?

Sometimes rather than asking ourselves which communication channel to use, perhaps we need to ask a different question: is there simply too much communication? Email, open plan offices, smart phones and collaboration tools such as Slack all make it easier than ever before to contact colleagues. But how often do we ask ourselves, “is this communication necessary?” I’m not saying I want to eliminate all unnecessary communication. That would be boring as hell. But in light of how much time we spend communicating, and how long it takes to refocus after an interruption, this is a question worth asking.

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