How to deal with your emails.
Simple tips to get the peace of mind you deserve.
I have always worked in start-ups. I just love to take part in the preliminary building blocks, when everything is possible and you can witness the system growing and getting better and better.
In these kind of environments, “how to deal with emails” is not a hot topic. It works good enough so … Why invest any more time in this ?
So everybody build its own way to process emails, according to its own habits, its own knowledge of the mailbox tool and its own tolerance to stress.
The main [unsuccessful] strategies I came across are :
- Using unread emails as a “to-do list”
- Sorting every single email in a deeply nested folder structure
- Using a lot of complex automatic filtering
These are NOT good strategies and if you send and receive 10 to 100 emails per day you will spend a lot of time tidying this up and mostly : you will miss important informations and/or generate a lot of stress thinking about it.
Here are a few tips to get a better control of your inbox, and relieve the stress of the missed emails.
Never delete an email
Very simple rule, and it will immediately relieve a lot of stress.
Just never delete an email. Ever.
If you receive unnecessary emails, you will never fix this deleting them.
Spend a minute understanding the source of this information, and fix the source instead : unsubscribe, set a better notification parameter …
Even if it’s seems crystal clear that the email belongs to the trash : don’t delete it! ( I will explain how to deal with it later )
There is a high chance you already experienced deleting an email that seemed useless at the time. But then, 6 month later you really really need it but it’s gone…
Stop deleting your emails and then BOOM, one decision you don’t have to take anymore. Fix the source instead.
Get inspired by the GTD method
The GTD (Get Things Done) method will help you process an arbitrary flow of information by breaking it into actionnable work items. You will get used to it very fast.
When you read a new email you will ask yourself 3 questions :
- Is it actionnable ? Does anybody have to do something to make it move forward ?
If not it’s either an information you want to keep, or just a notification or an advertisement you don’t need to keep. ( explanation in next part )
- Is it for me ?
If not, you should be able to transmit it and have a way to check when it’s done. ( explanation in next part )
- Does it take less than 2 minutes to do ?
If not, you should be able to register this mail as a task or defer it in your agenda. ( explanation in next part )
If you receive an email that is actionnable, for you, and use less than 2 minutes of your time : do it immediately.
Implement a GTD helper using Gmail.
I really love Gmail as a tool, I think it’s really well done even if a lot of features are not necessary in my daily workflow.
The feature I love the most is the multiple inboxes, because I can use it to have multiple point of views on my mailbox. You can find it in the advanced settings of Gmail.
Basically, the email you see in your inbox are just emails bearing an invisible Inbox label. That’s it. It’s the default point of view you get on your mailbox.
Using multiple inbox, you can have an additional point of view. Based on a search query using a label or a star present on your emails.
I use the yellow star on my emails to turn them into tasks I have to do.
I use a waiting label on my emails to turn them into tasks that someone else have to do but i want to keep an eye on.
I use an information label on my emails to turn them into useful information that I will need in the future as plane tickets, client id …
And then : the magic of multiple inbox happens. The search query is:starred will bring a new inbox that contains ONLY the emails that I already read and marked with a star as a task i have to do. When it’s done I remove the star and that’s it.
I do the same with the waiting label, but not with the information label. Using multiple inbox should be a way to constantly see less information, so i keep it for status labels or stars that i will add and then remove when it’s done.
Using multiple inbox, it’s possible to add multiple point of views on your mailbox and turn it into a real productivity tool.
Read everything before starting anything
I use the Archive button a lot, don’t be scarred. All that it does is removing the invisible Inbox label from the email. So the email is still there and you can find it in All Mails using the left menu. Basically the archive button is the same as taking your letters from your real mailbox and bring them to your home. It just empty the inbox but the mails are still there.
I use another advanced setting to read my inbox faster : Auto-Advance, to jump from email to email without going back to the email list.
With multiple inboxes set up the workflow is then pretty straight forward.
I just read all my new emails and ask myself the 3 questions from the GTD method :
- Is it actionnable ?
If it’s a meaningful information, I add an information label and then archive it. If it’s a notification I was expected I just archive it. If it’s something I didn’t want, I unsubscribe and archive. Simple.
- Is it a work for me ?
If it’s for someone else, i add a waiting label and send it to the proper recipient using Send and Archive (another advanced setting).
- Does it take less than 2 minutes to do ?
If not I add a yellow star and archive it.
And that’s it ! I refresh the page and my Inbox is empty, my todo inbox contains all the emails with a yellow star and my waiting inbox contains all the mails waiting for a response. It’s that simple.
I can now start to work, confident that I didn’t miss anything important.
Tweaking the Gmail inbox will allow you to save a lot of time and energy. You will be much more confident that you are currently focusing on the most important task possible.
Don’t let your inbox take too much decisions
When I run through email filters of colleagues, I have only one image in my mind : the brooms from The Sorcerer’s Apprentice in Fantasia. The lesson of this movie is : be careful when you give unattended power.
The filters should only help you to see more information, and never hiding it from you.
It’s very useful to add the proper label using keywords query, then when you open your inbox you will be able to check a message first based on this label.
But it could be very dangerous to archive anything based on a query. If there are emails you don’t want to receive anymore, fix the source.
And of course it’s completely forbidden to delete anything : based on a query or not.
Filters of any mailbox are very useful features, you can use it to enrich the information, and highlight interesting emails. But avoid to use it in order to hide any information, it’s the best way to completely miss important emails.
Trust the search engine
Use as less labels as possible. Labels are useful for a generic classification of emails but adding a new label to your list should always be a well thought decision.
The search engine of Gmail allows you to retrieve all the information you could think of and more using the sender email address, email subject and email body keywords. That’s definitely more than what I need.
As long as you easily keep an eye on the next things you have to do using multiple inboxes I’m pretty sure that the necessity for labels will drop drastically. It’s OK. Remove them. The emails will remain.
If you still need them, maybe you are trying to do in your mailbox a kind of work that should belong in another tool : Project management ? CRM ? Complex task management ? …
Using a lot of labels to classify all of your inbox represents a lot of unnecessary work. Use them for things that matter. The search engine will easily do the rest.
Using these tips, you should feel more relaxed about dealing with emails. You will never have to dig for tasks anymore. Your inbox becomes a tool.
Even if Inbox Zero is not an objective itself, it gives a considerable peace of mind and is completely doable on a daily basis using these few tips.
Let me know if you found any of these tips useful, and you can share this article to your colleagues too.
I’m a beginner on medium and would appreciate any feedback.
Don’t forget to clap this article, did you know you can clap 50 times ?
