The Cure for Email Time Suck (Part II)
Strategies to help you take control of your inbox and be more productive.
Not so long ago, office communication was done solely by phone, fax and in-person rendezvous, and none of it was as glamorous as the three-hour boozy lunches seen on Mad Men. Email may be more high tech than the stacks of paper memos, barely legible faxes and strained phone conversations of yore, but that’s also helped it proliferate faster than Don Draper’s list of exes. The hard truth for those with bulging inboxes is that email is not going the way of the dinosaurs anytime soon. The good news is, it does not have to be the time suck we discussed earlier this week. Here’s how to buckle down and take control of your inbox, instead of letting it control you.
Set Time Limits
Set firm limitations on how much time you will spend on email in a given day. This includes limiting the frequency with which you check your inbox: try to check it no more than hourly, and certainly not every five minutes (you know who you are). A major part of email overload stems from the unrealistic perception that you must respond to work email constantly, around the clock. Many people respond at all hours due to the prevalence of smartphones, giving themselves a reputation they struggle to maintain.
A 2012 survey of almost 500 executives, managers, and professionals by the Center for Creative Leadership found that 60% of respondents who use a smartphone for business purposes end up working between 13.5 and 18.5 hours a day. Further, as mobile technology has reached a higher market penetration since 2012, it’s easy to imagine that 60% is now a low estimate. Realistically, most of us shouldn’t have to respond to work email after work hours. And it may not even make us more productive.
Start with Work, not Email
On a similar note, when you get to the office in the morning, don’t check your email first thing. Try to wait 30 minutes or an hour, and then look at your inbox. Use this first half hour to an hour to catch up on non-email related tasks from the day before. Do some planning, update your to do list or catch up on some news. Cognitively, your focus is sharpest in mid to late morning, and surveys of workers have shown that the morning hours are the most productive, so morning is the time to harness this productive energy. Knock out this first hour or so without distracting yourself with your inbox, and you will likely be less overwhelmed when it comes time to start replying to messages.
Prioritize by Person
Prioritizing your communications will help you stay within your time budget. This does not mean responding to a few messages that you perceive to be urgent at the expense of ignoring all other communications. Rather, it means understanding which communications require more immediate action or response, which ones can wait till later, and which ones don’t merit your time at all. In statistics compiled by the Radicati Group in 2011, about 20% of email is unwanted spam, even in spite of spam filters. Often times, importance depends greatly on who the email is from. Applying tools that learn from your behavior, like Gmail Priority Inbox or AwayFind, will help you identify the most important email first, easing the pressure to scan over a ton of different messages to figure out which is most pressing. There are many different email productivity tools out there, and chances are you will be able to find one that you enjoy using.
Go Off the Notification Grid
Consider disabling email push notifications. Push notifications can be really useful (reminding you of important appointments, to pick up the kid from soccer practice, etc). But they are also a disruption and often alert you of nonessential email. If you are working on a difficult task that requires full concentration and your phone buzzes, it’s going to be a major temptation to stop whatever you are doing to at least look at the email. Free yourself from that temptation.
This point has been reiterated many times, but humans are not good at multitasking. The limits of our cognition just do not allow for it. Part of the reason email seems to take so much time is that we are often in the process of doing something else when we take a compulsive detour to the inbox, only to find that what was once five unanswered emails has multiplied to fifteen or twenty, or more. Soon you begin replying and totally lose focus on whatever you were doing before and whenever you return to it, whether it’s within 20 minutes or an hour, you have effectively lost steam and probably added a few new tasks onto a list of already unfinished ones. Constant interruptions destroy focus and productivity, which isn’t good for anyone.
Take it Slow
To minimize the chance of relapse, don’t try to implement all these time-saving changes at once. Starting small is a more sure path to reaching your goals, and changing your email habits shouldn’t be about extreme or drastic measures. Subtle behavioral shifts are what you are aiming for, and the more you put these principles into practice, the more you will find peace and balance with your email. And remember, your inbox does not have to be at zero for you to be the office hero.
