Let’s be honest. You have more important things to do than check your email messages.
And your stress about the number of un-reads in your email client — growing larger by the hour — is completely unnecessary.
Email is a tool for your benefit, but without some proper email management it may seem more like a torture device in the hands of hostile bosses, employees, or customers.
It’s time to reclaim this modern method of communication for your own good and productivity.
When your inbox starts to fill up, you may be tempted to click “mark all read” and “move to trash,” but if you have any sense of responsibility, you know you can’t resolve things that aggressively.
Reduce Email Messages to “Inbox Zero”
People send you email messages because they want something. Every note is another task that you are asked to deal with — another item on your to-do list. Just like a stack of homework in college or a mountain of chores at home, the constant stress of knowing there are hundreds of unresolved items in your email client is an almost tangible burden.
To be free from this stress, you need to have a clear focus on your goal: Inbox Zero.
When you sit down to handle your email, you need to end your session with a clean inbox. If you have hundreds or thousands of messages in your inbox right now, it might take a few sessions to get on track, but once you get the ball rolling, it will be crucial to maintain the inertia.
If you’ve been carrying the stress of an overflowing inbox for months or years, you’ll be amazed at how much of a relief it is to close the browser or email client on an empty inbox.
Email Management Emergency: Learn to Triage
When there is a catastrophic event, medical staff can be overwhelmed with a sudden influx of patients. To deal with the workload, they set up a triage system.
You can easily use the same type of system to deal with your email.
The goal in the triage is to process every message so that you have an accurate understanding of what you’re dealing with. This will go a long way in eliminating stress because (1) you will often reduce the total email count by 50% (or more), and (2) you will be taking action.
There are three categories for any message that you receive, and three corresponding actions that you should take:
- Delete
- Respond Immediately
- Respond Later
Every single message can be handled with one of these actions. If it’s not important, delete it. If it’s highly time sensitive and demands immediate action, give it immediate action. This might mean a reply, a phone call, or something else entirely, but every so often, you will have messages like these. If your immediate attention is not required on an item, save it for later.
One difficulty people often have in email management is determining the difference between the emails that truly require immediate attention and the ones that can be handled later. You will be better (and faster) at making these decisions as you get more practice, but a good rule of thumb is to default to responding later. This is because the more items that you respond to immediately, the more often your work flow is being interrupted by someone else’s demands. If you are able to process a message and schedule your response for another time, you are regaining control over your day. You are in charge.
Email Management: How to Create an Organization System
For any message that you don’t delete, you need somewhere to put it. This means you need a system to organize your emails.
I use Google’s Gmail, so I use “labels.” Your email client might have “folders,” but no matter what you call them, the important thing is that you use them.
How to best structure your labels or folders will depend largely on the way you think and the demands of your work. Through trial and error you will identify the best structure for your needs. The key is to develop a structure that is simple enough for you to know immediately where to put any email that comes in, but that is also logical enough that you can find anything that you might be looking for.
Recovering messages is an important aspect of your email organization system. This is another reason why I prefer to use Gmail. Google started as an Internet search engine, so of course they have a powerful search function for their email service. I love being able to search my archives to quickly find what I need.
Use Filters and Rules To Pre-Sort Email Messages
Email services and clients have become more sophisticated over the years, and you can use this sophistication to increase your productivity and reduce your workload.
In Gmail, they’re called “filters,” but your service may call them “rules,” but regardless of the name, they work wonders for email dominance.
If you’re like most people, you get the same types of messages on a regular basis. With filters, you don’t have to waste your mental processing power organizing email messages — your email client can do some of the work for you.
For example, if you get a weekly report from a boss, colleague, or employee, it probably comes with the same (or similar) subject line every time. You can create a filter that marks emails from that person (or people) with a certain keyword or keyword phrase. That way, when you are checking your email, you know straight off that this email is that regular report.
If you subscribe to a lot of blogs (like this one!) via email, you can probably rest assured that every email is going to come from the same email address. You can create a filter that marks these.
You can go one step further with these filters and have them not only mark the messages (so that you can identify them quickly) but also file them in your email organizational system automatically. This is a bit riskier because if you create your filter incorrectly, you might wind up misplacing a lot of emails. But if you are confident that a certain type of email always meets the same criteria and needs to go to the same place, you can use your email filters to handle this for you automatically.
Limit Your Email Activity and Responses
You may have heard the expression: “What goes around comes around.” This certainly applies to email. The number of emails you receive has a direct correlation to the number of emails you’re sending out. You can significantly reduce the number of pointless emails you receive by reducing the number of pointless emails that you send.
You will see the same concept hold true in social media. The more time you spend on Facebook sending messages, writing on walls, and poking people, the more often you will be receiving messages, posts on your wall, and random pokes.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with this. But it’s silly to wonder why people are contacting you so frequently if you are initiating…
… Or if you are maintaining the status quo. If you reply to every email you receive, you can expect to get more email in return. Before you respond, determine if your response is really necessary.
In situations where it is appropriate to respond, keep your responses short. Leo Babauta has a four-sentence rule. He says:
[Short emails are] more likely to get read and acted on, and it’ll take less of your time to write them. Try sticking to 4 sentences or fewer.
And if your emails are shorter, the responses will probably be shorter also — i.e., less future reading.
Batch Email for Better Time Management
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
— C. Northcote Parkinson
Working with an Inbox Zero rule, your email organization system, and your email filters, you will be finally free from much of the burden you’ve been living under.
The next step is to batch your email. If you give yourself all day to check your email, it will take all day to check your email. You have better things to do. It’s time to batch.
Batching is a time management tactic where you do only a certain activity for a limited period of time. Instead of having your email client pulled up or a tab open in your browser all day every day, you can schedule certain finite periods of time to process and read your email messages.
Your situational demands may vary, but many people do well to check email twice a day — an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon.
It’s probably not ideal to do email first thing in the morning. Remember, email is adding other people’s requests to your to-do list. It’s usually better to do what’s most important for you and your business first, and then to respond to new requests from others.
Start Dominating Your Inbox Today
You have the ability to regain control of your email client as soon as you make the decision to do it. There’s no reason for you to carry the stress of unread emails anymore. Start today, and you will be amazed at your increased productivity and quality of life.
Recent Comments