You’re Doing E-mail Wrong (Here are 5 Ways to Do It Right)
Email. It’s a blessing and a curse. But mostly a curse. Sure, ease and speed of communication, blah blah blah. Yet for most people e-mail is also a colossal bother and a waste of time. The mere mention puts a pit in the stomach and a glaze over the eyes. We need to put email in its appropriate place.
Here’s the thing:
1. If you check your email continually, do e-mail in the morning, and use notifications, you’re doing email wrong.
2. If you have old e-mail in your inbox right now, you’re doing email wrong.
3. If you start at the top with recently received emails and work your way down, you’re doing email wrong.
4. If you look at an email more than once, maybe twice, you’re doing email wrong.
5. If you delete emails from the same person or company frequently, you’re doing email wrong.
Let’s deal with each of these in turn.
Here are 5 simple yet powerful tips to get your email working for you instead of against you:
1) Check email only at set times
I hate banner notifications and automatic e-mail checking apps. It distracts from the essential with the trivial. I’m trying to use technology to streamline things so I can do what’s important, not have an endless string of things vying for my attention.
Here’s what you have to do: Turn off your banner notifications. All of them. (Ok, except maybe text messages). Do not use Gmail Notifier. Do not get a notice every time someone likes your posts. Quit your email application entirely when you are finished with it, so you don’t see that little red number.
I despise being interrupted from a creative or devotional rhythm, only to delete a single email encouraging me to buy things I don’t need.
Instead, determine set times and only check your email then.
Personally, I check email for the first time at 10–11am, after my most important daily task is completed and when normal workflow energy has begun to dip. I usually check it again at 4pm, just before finishing for the day. That’s it. Twice a day, no more.
And guess what, no one minds! No one has ever hounded me about not seeing or answering an email quickly enough. In fact, I receive thanks for my prompt responses, since I have a system for processing email quickly and efficiently so I nearly always reply the same day. You may have a larger flow of e-mail in your particular work and need 3 or 4 times for checking, but that is the maximum for the majority of people.
Productivity is about energy management. Email is a low-energy task. It doesn’t take much to delete some junk and type some responses. So never use your precious high-energy, high-focus time in the morning for something so trivial and easy as email! Make your first e-mail check time after 10am. Just try it. You’ll be amazed how non-urgent almost all of your email is.
2) Get to Inbox Zero
If you’re like most people, your inbox ranges from full to bursting to ridiculous. That is because most people look at their email and don’t know what to do with it, so they just leave it in the inbox. Worse, they may “Mark as Unread” even though it isn’t, leaving a mix of read and unread messages that are tiring just to look at.
I’ve been tweaking a system for e-mail for a year now that has kept my inbox free and clear. It feels amazing. I love looking at a blank inbox.
Right now it may seem impossible, but you too can live with an empty inbox.
The main thing it takes is setting aside some time, maybe even a full day, and plowing through. It seems daunting, but I promise it will be worthwhile. The time it takes to get down to zero is less than you think and it will pay huge dividends in the future.
Remember, you can search for certain senders, “select all” and archive them in a single click. Also, I’ll teach you how to create filters and apply rules so e-mails will be sorted for you automatically. If you have 5,458 e-mails in your inbox right now, it doesn’t mean you need to sort each one individually. You can achieve a clean inbox!
The mental stress of looking at a cluttered inbox becomes apparent only when you enter the bliss state of Inbox Zero.
For practical help with Inbox Zero, you can’t do better than Matt Perman’s article or the good guys at Asian Efficiency, who have a detailed article and a free toolkit.
3) Prioritize with filters and folders
Now you need to prioritize your inbox so you can give your best time and energy to the most important messages.
Imagine taking meetings based on whoever last asked for your attention. That would be crazy. You would be pulled all over the place, victim to whoever was latest and loudest.
Yet many of us approach our email exactly this way. The last e-mail we received is at the top and gets our attention first, whether it’s something important from the boss or a suggestion that we subscribe to Vogue. Clearly these are not equal priorities, so why do we let ourselves fall prey to whoever was last to our inbox?
This concept is from Rory Vaden’s talk on “3 Types of Procrastination.” He calls it priority dilution when we react to others priorities instead of acting on our own.
The main thing you can do to prioritize your inbox is create filters and folders. Filters make some messages skip your inbox, while folders send messages from certain senders to pre-selected destination. That way, you can start with what is important and work your way down by priority, not time stamp.
Create folders called “More than 2 Minutes,” and “Waiting.” Some emails are going to take a while to process (“More than 2 Minutes,” a title that will make more sense after the next tip). Some require more information or a response from someone else before you are finished with it (“Waiting”). You can also use a program that allows you to “snooze” an email so it will bounce back to your inbox after a specified period of time. Then you don’t even have to use the “Waiting” folder.
These folders prioritize your inbox.
It is possible that a truly urgent e-mail will come through. This is the one exception to my rule about not checking e-mail in the morning. You can create a folder labeled “Urgent” and have your e-mail client automatically filter messages from certain people or with certain keywords into this folder. Then you can check your email in the morning, but only for those messages. Do not get sucked into the vortex of “I’ll just answer a few of these.” It is a huge drain on your focus and energy when you could be devoting yourself to more worthy tasks.
The more time you spend with this system, the more you can refine the settings on your folders. Some people like to have more folders based on the sender’s importance (VIP) or category (“work,” “friends,” and “family”). Then you can hone the email clients’ ability to file messages from certain senders and keywords into the correct folders. With time, you will be getting e-mail automatically sorted into the appropriate places and dealing with them in order of importance.
4) Have a method for the madness.
Once you have achieved Inbox Zero, it’s important to keep it that way. Each time you look at an email there is a small price to pay in mental energy. That is why you should be looking at an email only once, sometimes twice.
How is that possible?
You need a system for how you will process your e-mail.
As an overarching principle, any time you look at e-mail — and I can’t overestimate the importance of this simple tip — use David Allen’s 2-minute rule. Whenever you see something you can deal with in 2 minutes or less, do it right away.
Now, for the actual system.
First, check your “Urgent” folder and deal with anything that deserves your immediate attention. If it isn’t actually urgent, move it to “More than 2 Minutes.”
Next, process your primary inbox. Deal immediately with things that will take less than 2 minutes to complete. Anything that will take more than 2 minutes goes into the handy “More than 2 Minutes” folder. If you receive any tasks, move them to your to-do list app and archive the message. Appointments should be moved to your calendar. Any important information can be saved in Evernote. Do not use e-mail for storage!
Next, process your “More than 2 Minutes” folder down to zero. I like to do this only at the end of each day, because I don’t have enough energy for much more than e-mail at that point in the day. You saw this e-mail once when you sorted it, and this is the second time you have looked at the message. It will also be the last because you will process each email to completion.
At the end, look at your RollUp of forms and subscriptions (see #5 below).
There’s your system for maintaining a clean and clear inbox:
Whenever you open your email, check the “Urgent” folder first. Then check your regular inbox, using the 2-minute rule and sorting e-mails into the appropriate folder. Then move on to “More than 2 Minutes.” Process each of these folders down to zero. Finally, look at your Roll Up.
5) Get off that list!
One important way to keep email to a minimum of time and energy is to receive fewer emails in the first place.
I highly recommend using UnrollMe. In just a couple of minutes they will identify every email subscription you are currently receiving. Then you can go down the list and mark either “Unsubscribe Me,” “Keep Going to Inbox,” or “Roll it Up.”
Your first step is to ruthlessly consider whether each subscription is truly worthwhile and cancel any that are not a clear Yes.
While it’s incredibly helpful to have an easy way to see all your subscriptions and unsubscribe with one click, the “Roll Up” is the real genius of UnrollMe. Any emails you want to keep receiving, but are not important enough to deserve immediate access to your inbox can be placed in your daily Roll Up.
UnrollMe will keep all these emails out of your inbox, then “roll them up” into one email that comes at a specified time (I get mine at 2pm). This allows you to see at a glance many emails that are mostly irrelevant, then archive them all at once. If you want to view or respond to a message, just click it. If you are worried something important got put in there, you can access the Roll Up any time.
And there ya go. 5 easy-to-implement steps that will put email in its place instead of running your life. Do these, and you’ll spend less time doing email better.
Note: This is a chapter from my e-book, “Work Better: A Christian Primer on Productivity.” Get it free at my blog.
To-Do this week:
• Get all your inboxes to Zero
• Sign up for UnRoll Me and sort your subscriptions
• Create the necessary Folders
• Create and stick to your Email Check Times
