Is dealing with your email becoming like a second job–you know, you can’t really get anything done because you’re always stuck in your blasted inbox?
Or you look in your inbox and feel like you’re being buried alive by the 500 emails that are staring you in the face and mocking your attempts to get the situation under control?
I hear ya–I always say that email is like the Bermuda Triangle of productivity.
One of the ways I try to get my email under control is to only check it at certain times and not give it the chance to “beep” me away from what I’m doing all day long.
That helps a little bit, but it still doesn’t get rid of the root of the problem, which is that there’s too much stuff in the old inbox.
I was listening to an interview Merlin Mann did with David Allen (creator of “Getting Things Done”) about email management, and I’ve gotta tell you, it may have changed my life.
No kidding–it’s good stuff. Let me pass on some of the nuggets of wisdom I picked up from these two GTD masters about taming the dreaded email monster:
1) Your email is not a work space; it’s an information input tool, just the same as your voicemail, your inbox on your desk or your mailbox in front of your house.
It’s a place to pick up information, not a place to linger, sort, fiddle and scroll endlessly.
Merlin puts it this way, “If you’re a short order cook, you’re in the business of making sandwiches, not stacking orders.”
To be more efficient with email, we need to pick up our orders, then get back into the kitchen and make those sandwiches!
2) Ditch the byzantine folder system. Aha! This is the tip that got me. And I thought I was being so organized by having an intricate network of folders and sub-folder to store my collection of emails.
I stand corrected! What I got from Merlin and David was that you should streamline your folders as much as possible.
You have your inbox. Then you have your “archive” folder. Then you may have your “response needed” folder. Perhaps you have a “pending” folder. That’s it. Of course, depending on your work, maybe you’ll have a few more, but you get the idea–Streamline those folders.
The strategy is to sort on the front end, the first time you see the email.
During your scheduled email check time, you take action on each email and get it out of your face.
You either respond to it, archive it, or dump it.
I guess if it’s an email that needs a response that you don’t have yet, then it could go in the “response needed” or a “pending” folder.
You call it what you want. The point is that the gazillion folders and sub-folders sitting in our inboxes aren’t really helping us be more productive.
3) Use your “archive” folder to satisfy your pack-rat tendencies. I admit, I’m an email pack-rat. I save emails forever (all cataloged in a very specific, wonderfully complex folder system, of course), thinking that someday I might want to look at them again.
David says this is fine, but you don’t need the intricate folder system.
If you want to save an email that you’ve already dealt with, put it in the “archive” folder. If you need it later, do a search.
Let’s face it, if you have a mind-bogglingly complex folder system, you’ll need to do a search in order to find stuff anyway, so why not give up the charade, save some time and just put all emails you want to save in one folder?
4) Zero out your inbox at the end of each day. Yes, you read that right–when you close shop at the end of a day, your inbox should be empty, just like your voicemail. (You know it would drive you crazy to leave that red light blinking on your voicemail. 
)
This is a hefty topic and deserves it’s own blog post, so I can’t really cover this in depth right here and now. If you can’t wait for my forthcoming post about zeroing out your inbox, you can check out Merlin’s post about it.
5) Check emails fast and only at certain times. David says that inboxes get clogged up due to a lack of executive decision making skills. If you train yourself to make fast, executive decisions about the stuff in your inbox when it first appears, you’ll be able to get through email quickly and respond, trash, and archive appropriately.
The speed at which you handle your email also has to do with having scheduled email check times. Don’t keep your email open all day long so that the siren’s song of the “new mail” chime can lure you into your inbox.
Merlin says he checks his once an hour, I check mine twice a day, and David says you may be able to get away with checking it even less, depending on what type of work you do. The point is not to live in your inbox.
6) Liberate your appointments and tasks from your email to an external system. Do you ever let an email sit in your inbox to remind you about a meeting or phone call? Merlin says not to use your inbox for that purpose–if you want to remind yourself of a meeting, use a calendar or something.
7) Question unreasonably high email expections. Do you feel like you need to respond to emails within minutes or hours of their arrival in your inbox?
You’re not alone. The expectation that because email is transmitted instantly that you need to respond instantly is killing many folks’ productivity.
If you think you need to answer your emails within minutes, you’re going to have trouble getting work done, because you’ll have to be staked out in your inbox all the time.
The result of this vigilant email attitute is that we’re always checking, checking, checking, but not actually doing anything.
For some folks, it’s a necessity to always be on call with emails, but I think most of us don’t have to be that radical about things.
The newest information you get is not necessarily the most important. When we stake ourselves out in our inbox, we’re being seduced by the immediacy of email, and we’re giving many tasks an elevated priority simply because they’re new.
Let’s all say this out loud: “The newest information we receive is not necessarily the most important.”
Also, if we’re constantly distracted and racing to respond to emails, we’re operating in emergency mode all day long, every day. Not fun and not condusive to the zen work flow that we’re trying to achieve.
Conclusion: One thing that David said that stuck in my mind is that our problem with email is not information overload. If we had problems with information overload our brains would explode every time we walked into a library.
Of course we don’t feel immediate overwhelm in a library, so why does email bring us to our knees?
David says that the only difference between email and other avenues of information delivery is speed. Stuff comes at us so quickly that we have trouble determining what’s junk and what’s meaningful (and hence the need for tips on how to tame your inbox).
Thanks David and Merlin! You can catch the complete interview here.
Posted on Nov 2nd 06 by Sharon Sarmiento.
Sharon Sarmiento owns Streamline, the Virtual Business Management company. She works with internet tech & web media companies by managing the daily operations of online businesses and streamlining processes to maximize personal and business productivity. For free resources on productivity, creativity and virtual entrepreneurism, visit => http://www.eSoupBlog.com/
Other posts on Coachamatic by Sharon Sarmiento.
Great tips! Thanks so much!
One thing that has helped me and our staff tremendously (!!!!!) is subscribing to Spam Arrest. It has cut my emails by literally 100’s per day. I was getting so much spam! Now I receive only the emails I really want.
Thanks for the bonus tips Tracy! Another thing folks can do to manage their email more effectively on the front end is to use email filtering. If there are emails you get routinely (if you use autoresponders and such) that you want to save, but don’t need to reply to or that you’d like to collect in one folder, you can set up email filters so that they automatically get filed in the appropriate folder. I did this recently for someone and his emails in his inbox were cut from about 500/day down to a manageable 5-10! Those 5-10 were the ones that really needed personal responses, and it was much more doable to process a handful of relavent emails than to manually sort through 500! I think we were both dancing for joy when we put that email filtering thing in place
.
I enjoyed reading this - I do tend to constantly flick to Outlook while I am supposed to be doing something else, and it always completely destroys my concentration on the task in hand. So why do I do it? Who knows? May be I’m looking for distractions so I don’t have to concentrate on doing anything constructive!
So, from this day forth…
I will physically close down Outlook and only open it again and check my email twice a day - once in the morning and again before closing off.
This should boost my productivity no end.
Thanks, Sharon!
Good for you, Steve! And I know what you mean about feeling the urge to check email all the time–it’s sort of addictive! It’s kind of like having the urge to turn on the TV and flick endlessly through the channels–why do we do it??? I think whoever invented email may have unwittingly unleashed everyone on earth’s latent obsessive/compulsive tendencies
. When I started implementing my email check times, it was like, “Whew–finally, I can work in peace now!”
This is great, Sharon. I’m going to try it. Or maybe I’ll (gulp) just do it. Or maybe I shouldn’t say “maybe” or “try.” OK then. I’m doing it. Right now.
Yay, Verna! I guarantee you’ll breathe a sigh of relief when you do!
–positive thoughts only!)
(And notice I said “when” and not “if”
Tip that works for me… check emails while transfusing the first cup of coffee, early in the morning (read 6 am). Respond after second cup (6:30)… get your replies in before anyone else shows up for work; this means that your stuff is at the top of their pile. Close it down and check in again the next morning. Voila! You have a day to be productive and not just busy.
Oooo-that’s a good idea Maggie. Clear out your email before anyone else gets to work! I’ll have to try that one. It’s sort of the same effect of responding to them on a Sunday morning, or a Friday night. No one else is “supposed” to be working, so you’re free to work in peace. And I like the idea of checking only once a day. Thanks for the bonus email pointer!
Wow - do I need this! I often feel like I have ADD. I’ll be making updates to my site and then check email, which reminds me of something else I need to address/update, and then I’ll check email again, etc etc. I’m setting up my filters and then turning off Outlook. Whew!
1.
How timely!
I’ve been working on developing systems that “Tame the Internet” for me over the past 9 weeks.
I’ve been wondering how to tame my ultra-extensive email folders system. Not quite ready to adopt the three or four folders suggestion here, but may be getting there.
Wish there was a way to store folders OFF and out of Outlook Express. Because I’ve collected some great courses (30-parts, 70-parts, 110 parts) and other great compendiums of highly niched information that I don’t need sitting in my folders list every time I open my email. And yet, I don’t want to dump them. And I don’t want to DE-organize them by dumping their contents into a single “archive” folder melting pot.
Have bought a program that lets me open dbx files and folders outside of Outlook and Outlook Express. Am not yet convinced that I’m comfortable with how it works. But if I can get there with it, then I CAN move the folders OUT of Outlook and still have access to them when I want it. Which I think is ideal. Hope future generations of Outlook Express and Outlook have this feature built in. You should be able to archive selective email folders on your hard drive and NOT have to store them all in the folders list in Outlook.
2.
Want to disagree with the “the issue is not information overload” assertion that uses the library as a evidence. I see faulty logic there.
When I walk into a library, I don’t have to scan every book on every shelf to determine if it’s something I need to read right now. I go in looking for a particular book, or to explore a particular subject.
On the other hand, I don’t get to choose what is in my inbox and everything in it is addressed to me, pretends that it is something that I need to read right now. And some of it really is. And the only way I can tell, is to skim the whole list. And to use sophisticated pre-flitering, to weed the list.
I’ve been experimenting with the latter and am finding a $30 program called Ella to be the most friendly helpful of the 11 I’ve tried so far (including the open-source ones). I’ve also been ruthlessly unsubscribing from mailing lists. But I’m still getting 1,200-plus emails a day, approximately 90 percent of which are spam. Ella manages to shove about 90% of the spam into a “Spam” folder that I can quickly review in about three minutes. It also shoves about four or five legitimate emails into the spam folder each day, even after a couple weeks of training. So I HAVE to scan the spam folder quickly each email download.
3.
I discovered, while doing Coaching Insider, how inefficient it was to check email every 10 or so minutes (as I had been in the habit of doing since 1995. And I reset my mail program to only check once every 90 minutes then. In the last nine weeks I’ve turned off automatic mail checking altogether. And I’m trying to teach myself to only check email once a day, at the end of the day.
Haven’t succeeded with that consistently. Because I’m often needing to see at the beginning of my workday whether I’ve gotten a response from an inquiry I’ve made the previous day. Some of my day’s work depends upon that.
So still wrestling with that one.
But I do find, those days that I don’t check email unitl evening, that my productivity is much, much higher. That first thing in the a.m. check of email is totally disorienting and distracting and conspires to control the day with unplanned diversions. In fact, every mid-work-day check of email has that potential.
Really appreciate the list you’ve compiled, Sharon. And look forward to the next installment.