Ah, you were wondering when we’d get to email, weren’t you? It’s a bitch, I know. In the modern era, staying on top of email is the embodiment of the old saying, “It’s not easy, but somebody has to do it,” and alas, that somebody is you. And if you’re constantly running behind, the time you spend typing could very well be to blame.
(Not to mention time spent hunting for the perfect emoji. They have a wild boar, two dragons, and a puffer fish, but no Aladdin Sane? How often do puffer fish come up in people’s text conversations? A lot less than David Bowie comes up in mine, I assure you.)
Anyway, for better or worse, keeping your shit together means managing the fuck out of your email—personal and professional—not to mention text messages, Slack channels*, Snapchat, Fumblr, FacePlace, MyLink, whatever. These forms of communication can be necessary, unnecessary, fun, or tedious, but they are ALL time-consuming, which is something a lot of people don’t take into account when they blithely press Send on their thirty-seventh “Great, thanks!” of the day.
I’ll be using email as a primary example because it’s the twenty-first century, but the same general principles apply to all correspondence, such as unearthing your bills, RSVP cards, and Crate & Barrel fall upholstery sale coupons (hey, 20 percent off a couch is nothing to sneeze at) from a year’s worth of Athleta catalogues that are useless to you unless you grow five inches this year and develop a fondness for spandex prints.
Where were we? Right, email.
Okay, so now, rather than cowering at your desk like, I don’t know… a coward, I’m going to need you to sit up straight, flex those typing fingers, and get to work. If your inbox is Mount Everest, let’s channel your inner Sherpa and get climbin’.
Pleading “I get too much email” as an excuse for not having your shit together is like saying “There are too many mosquitos in my backyard so I’m going to just sit here and let them devour me whole rather than mist my body in readily available bug spray and light some citronella candles.”
!!!NEWSFLASH!!! Most of us get a shitload of email. But it’s not necessarily “too much” based on volume. It may just seem like too much for you based on your current organizational systems, which are either half-assed or nonexistent.
Yes, some of us get more than others, but quantity of email is not really the problem. Time management is the problem. The reason you feel like you have too much email is because you are not dealing with your email in a timely, efficient fashion.
Apart from unsubscribing to mailing lists* and begging your father to take you off his dirty joke chain, there is almost nothing you can do to reduce the volume of email you receive. All you can do is attack it like Ed Norton attacks his own split personality, played by Brad Pitt, in Fight Club. (Sorry if I just ruined that movie for you, but you have emails to return before you can watch it anyway.)
But lest you get discouraged, notice that I said “almost” nothing you can do. There is one simple tactic you can employ to reduce the number of messages you get.
You can reduce the number that you send.
Do you treat your outbox as your own personal verbal vomitorium? Do you spend hours composing long, perfect emails that nobody ever reads? Or maybe you have eight different chains going with the same person, even though each one is about the same project (or the same Channing Tatum movie)?
Well, if part of your overflowing inbox problem is YOU, then you can cut that shit off at the source. Here are a few techniques to get you started on sending fewer emails:
That was not Rick James
You want to reach out and cyber-touch someone for fun or because you’re bored (procrastinating much?) so you send three innocuous but unnecessary emails—about the weather, the sale at LensCrafters, and the guy who might have been but probably was not Rick James on the bus during your morning commute. You spend two minutes composing each email and—wonder of wonders—you receive three replies. Which you then spend two more minutes (each) reading, and possibly replying to (another two minutes). The Constant Cycle of Reply continues. Suddenly, you’ve spent twenty minutes in three different useless email conversations today, and you wonder why your inbox is swelling like a pregnant lady’s ankles in August?
I have a ways to go on this front myself, but I try to be judicious. Sometimes I go so far as to type out the two-minute message, then think for a second about whether it’s opening an annoying can of worms (for me, or for the person on the other end), and delete it. So maybe I lost two minutes and one second, but at least I saved myself time dealing with a potential reply, not to mention saved my husband a useless story about not-Rick-James.
Go all-inclusive
If you have a boss/coworker/client you email regularly, try to condense your communiqués into one or two messages instead of five, six, or sixteen. If your question or notion isn’t time-sensitive, put it into a draft message that you add to all week and then send it all at once. This also helps you separate the wheat from the chaff—if you keep running drafts for your eyes only, then by Wednesday you might realize Monday’s question was stupid. Delete it, and nobody else will ever have to know.
Do it the old-fashioned way
Pick up the phone. Journey across the hall. Fire up the walkie-talkies. You might spend less time having a single, live conversation with another human than you would going back and forth over email—especially if you’re spending valuable time trying to get your “tone” right. Tone is a thing that comes across pretty fucking clearly right out of your mouth, no emoticons necessary.
Who cares?
Not every idea that pops into your head has to be committed to email and sent off immediately like a typhoid case to the quarantine tent. Before you start typing, ask yourself: Does this even fucking matter? Half the time, it doesn’t.
And here are some techniques for sending better emails.
Just the facts, ma’am
Do you agonize over composing work emails, and then the people on the other end don’t do half (or any) of what you asked for, and you have to follow up with them a week later anyway? That’s because they saw your name in their inbox and their auto-response was “tl;dr.”* Your emails are a thing of informative, emotionally nuanced beauty, but they are TOO FUCKING LONG. I’ve been on both ends of this equation (Anti-gurus: they’re just like us!) and it doesn’t end well for anyone.* In act II, scene two of Hamlet, notorious windbag Polonius announces, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” Well, it’s the soul of effective email communication at work, too.
You: Stick to the important shit, no rhetorical curlicues, and spend less time composing your missive. They: Actually read it. Everyone: Wins.
Ask leading questions
Anytime you see a press conference on TV, there are about thirty journalists for every one who gets to ask a question of the celebrity, politician, or FBI director at the podium. That means if they get called on, their question has to count, and count big. One, maybe two sentences, delivered succinctly. Think of your emails the same way. Ask the thing you most need answered in the very first line, and you’re much more likely to get an answer. Also, you may realize you don’t need lines two through twenty-nine.
Start the clock
Establish urgency up front (not, however, with those red exclamation points—those are email suicide). Instead, use clear, informative language near the top of your message, such as “I need to know by 5 PM.” Putting a time frame on someone’s response may feel a little pushy at first, but as long as you’re not the Intern Who Cried Wolf, people are likely to respond better to a specific deadline than to any kind of mealymouthed “When you have a moment.”
If it’s that low a priority, you probably shouldn’t even be sending this email.
But for the sake of argument, let’s say you’ve got a pretty good handle on your own sending habits. Either you never had a problem to begin with (sure you didn’t), or you’ve been taking the preceding advice to excellent results (you’re welcome). And although you’ve successfully weaned your dad off sending you boob memes, the volume of received still has you snowed under, Shining-style.
What you need is a different horror-movie-as-antidote: The Purge. It might take longer than two hours to sit through, but by the end you’ll have goose bumps. In a good way.
A friend of mine recently admitted that she has 13,000 emails hanging out in her cyber-garage. Needless to say, I weep for her.
Not since the day she first logged in has she known that magical moment when there is nothing left in her inbox that requires her attention. That moment is called Inbox Zero and oh God, it feels good.
(Although here I should point out that much like the phrase Zero Fucks Given, this term can be a bit misleading. Giving zero fucks would essentially mean you lived alone, naked and asleep in a sensory deprivation tank—which I suppose means you wouldn’t get any email either, but that’s not really a feasible outcome for anyone outside of a Philip K. Dick story. Getting all the way to literally zero messages in your inbox might be similarly unfeasible, but you can certainly get close.)
What you—and my friend, bless her heart—need to do is purge, purge, purge. And then flex your purging muscles on a daily or weekly basis to ensure you never have to devote more than a small amount of time to it ever again. The initial purge may take a whole day. If you have 13,000 emails, it could take a week. But if you’re serious about getting your shit together in the long term, you have to strategize, focus, and commit in the short term. Spend the time now to save it later.
Here’s what the Purge looks like:
Strategize: Get to zero (or close) messages by deleting, filing, or responding to everything currently in your inbox, in one fell swoop.
Focus: Reserve the necessary time in your calendar. Quick, before you get ten more emails! (If things are totally out of control, you can count your messages and tackle 10 percent of them in one go, to estimate how long it will take you and how many Red Bulls you’ll have to go the Full Monty.) You will no doubt have to prioritize the Purge over something less urgent, such as waxing your legs or… other things.
Pro tip: Purging early in the morning or late at night helps, since you’re less likely to receive a ton of new messages while you’re trying to get a handle on your current situation.
Commit: Start with “Delete” because it’s so fucking easy. That’s when you’ll sit there with your down arrow key and trash icon fingers ready to stamp out expired airfare deals, Weight Watchers at Work sign-up sheets, and junk mail that you inexplicably didn’t delete the moment it arrived. Were you planning to respond to that nice Nigerian man who asked you to wire him $300,000? Sorting by sender is a gift—you can eradicate all the emails from Human Resources with a single stroke. Have you ever received a useful email from HR? Exactly.
Next, you’ll need to “File.” Your email program comes with a folder-adding feature. Trust me on this. So if there’s a message that doesn’t require action but you need access to it for posterity, you can create a folder and then file that shit away. My email folders have names like “Speaking invites,” “Germany,” and “Misc.” (The miscellaneous folder functions like that drawer you shove all your sex toys into when your mother comes to visit. Very handy.)
Finally, it’s “Reply” time. This is what you’ve been avoiding all along—telling people you “never got that email” or “haven’t had time to look at it” because you either legit didn’t see it among the 12,999 other messages or you prioritized that back-and-forth with your friend Tina about your UTI symptoms over, you know, actual work. Time to pour yourself a nice tall glass of cranberry juice and bang ’em out. Once separated from the herd, most will probably be pretty easy to spot and cull, but if a particular message is going to take a lot of thought/time to reply to, set it aside and schedule that as a single task on your must-do list for the week. (Just heed Polonius while you’re at it.)
Butt in the seat, delete, delete, delete. Go the extra mile and file, file, file. Don’t be that guy: Reply, reply, reply!
Once you’ve successfully purged your way to Inbox Zero or thereabouts, catching up on email won’t be a perennially looming disaster. It can just have its own time slot, where you focus on it, and only it (X), for Y minutes or hours, depending on your needs.
And if you have a Pavlovian reaction to the ping of notifications on your cell phone or computer, you know you can turn those off, right? I used to do that when I wanted to edit at my desk without being interrupted, and I never missed an urgent message. All that shit was waiting for me after lunch when I was good and ready to deal with it. Of course, I worked in publishing. If you’re a Google employee, they might court-martial you for that. It’s a judgment call.
The key is time management, and knowing what your regular volume really looks like—not that insane backlog that you built up over the last six months. You can perform the 10 percent purge I talked about, extrapolate, and then set aside whatever time you need to handle your email during your day or week. If you budget thirty minutes or two hours to do that (and nothing else), you’ll be more organized, less frazzled, and will no longer have a reputation as That Guy Who Never Responds to My Emails.
Finally, I have a special tip for all the Simons out there.
Are you worried that if you step away from your email for too long, heads will roll, kingdoms will fall, the Chipmunks will never get booked for another gig, and it will be all your fault?
Then you have Inbox Anxiety, and I’m here to tell you that “pathological responsiveness,” however tempting, is not the answer.
I know you think it is. So did I for, like, twenty years or however long email was around until I figured out I was trapped in the Constant Cycle of Reply. No end and no beginning, less gross than the Human Centipede, but equally tragic.*
For starters, pathologically responding to email the moment it comes in is textbook reactive vs. proactive behavior. It’s like treading water instead of swimming for shore—you’re expending all that energy just to stay in one place. A bad place. An anxious place. You might as well wrap all those email chains around your ankles and sink right down to the bottom, because that’s where you’re headed anyway. If you engage in aggressive acts of delete-file-reply all day long, you’ll never accomplish anything else, and you will drown. In email. Got it?
You’ll probably also wind up responding too quickly to one message and realizing seconds (or an hour) later that there was more to say, necessitating another email. Wait. Don’t be reactive. Focus on it later, all at once, when you have time and energy to be thoughtful, strategic, and proactive. When you can respond with just the facts, ma’am and have time to go all-inclusive.
If you find yourself in the grip of Inbox Anxiety, try the “Stop, drop, and roll” exercise from here. Back slowly away from your device, take a deep breath, consult your must-do list, and remember: You’ll get to your emails at 3:00 PM today, in between the dentist and drafting that press release.
The magic of scheduling ([cough] calendars [cough]) can free your mind from Inbox Anxiety.
That’s some high-quality mental decluttering, right there.
And although email is probably the most common, pervasive threat to getting your shit together, correspondence takes many forms. As I said earlier, after reading and taking this section to heart, you may find yourself thinking twice about sending that needless text or posting in Slack, lest you generate an avalanche of self-imposed distraction and Constant Cycle of Reply that leaves you unable to breathe, let alone get shit done.
It’s tough being a human centipede.