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Simple E-mail

FOR MANY OF us, e-mail has become one of our standard modes of working. We live in our e-mail in-box, doing everything from personal communication with family and friends to carrying out complete projects through e-mail.

Unfortunately, e-mail has also come to overwhelm us, taking us away from more important tasks, threatening to take over our lives.

There’s a better way than living in your e-mail in-box. Minimize your time spent doing e-mail, transform your e-mail effectiveness by setting limitations, and become an e-mail master by getting your in-box to empty.

It’s possible to do all these things, by setting limits and by learning to process e-mail quickly with simple rules and habits. You can get out of e-mail and back to doing things that are important—your One Goal, for example, or your top three projects, or your Most Important Tasks.

The way to e-mail nirvana is by applying the Power of Less—simplify, set limits, and find yourself becoming more powerful with e-mail.

LIMIT YOUR IN-BOXES

How many different ways do you get information? Some people might have six different kinds of communications to answer—text messages, voice mails, paper documents, regular mail, blog posts, messages on different online services (MySpace, Face-book, AOL, et al). Each of these is a type of in-box, and each must be processed on a continuous basis. It’s an endless process, but it doesn’t have to be exhausting or stressful.

Getting your information management down to a more manageable level and into a productive zone starts by minimizing the number of in-boxes you have. Every place you have to go to check your messages or to read your incoming information is an in-box, and the more you have, the harder it is to manage everything. Cut the number of in-boxes you have down to the smallest number possible for you still to function in the ways you need to.

Here’s how:

 

1. List all the ways you receive information. You might forget a few at first, but as you remember new ways, add them to the list. The list should include digital and analog information—paper and computer.

 

2. Evaluate each to see if it gives you value. Sometimes we continue to check certain in-boxes, even if it’s not adding anything to our lives. It’s just more stuff to check. Have a pager when you also have a cell phone? Maybe the pager isn’t any use to you anymore.

 

3. Find ways to combine or eliminate in-boxes. If something’s not giving you value, consider eliminating it from your life. See if you can go a week without missing it. For all the rest, see if you can combine multiple information streams into one in-box. For example, how many places in your home do incoming papers get placed? Have one in-box at home for all mail, papers from work, school papers, phone notes, computer printouts, schedules, and more. Have four e-mail services? See if you can forward them all to one service. Get voice mails from a couple of different services? Try forwarding them to one service, or use an Internet service to deliver them to your e-mail in-box. At work, have one in-box for all incoming paperwork. Read a lot of blogs? Put them all into a feed-reader, in a single stream of posts, instead of having to check twenty-five different in-boxes. The fewer in-boxes you have, the better. Aim for four to seven in-boxes if possible; one or two would be ideal.

LIMIT YOUR TIME IN E-MAIL

If you spend all of your day in e-mail, or going back to e-mail and checking for new messages, you’ll never get much else done. Instead, make the decision to only check e-mail at predetermined times, and leave it alone for the rest of the day—that will allow you to work on more important stuff.

I recommend that you decide, in advance, how many times you’ll check e-mail, and at what times. Here are some tips:

• Number of times per day. How many times you check e-mail per day is a function of the kind of work you do. If you can get away with checking e-mail just once per day, that would be ideal—you’d have very few e-mail interruptions and your e-mail habits would be most efficient. However, for many people, twice a day is probably more realistic. Others, who need to be able to get e-mail more often because their job orders are sent through e-mail (customer service, for example), might want to limit their e-mail checking to once per hour (perhaps ten minutes at the top of the hour). Still others might be able to get away with checking e-mail less than once a day—every other day, twice a week, or even once a week. If you can count yourself among these people, take advantage of this and limit yourself to the bare minimum.
• The best times. I’ve found that if you check twice a day—10 a.m. and 4 p.m. are good times—that lets you get a mid-morning feel for what urgent e-mails you have and then allows you to finish up your e-mail before you leave for the day. However, each person’s workday is different—you should take a look at your work habits, your usual schedule, and your needs, and decide what times are best for you. Then stick to those times.
• Not first thing in the morning. A common productivity tip is not to check e-mail first thing in the morning, and it’s good advice. By checking e-mail in the morning, you’re allowing e-mail to dictate the rest of your day, instead of deciding for yourself what your Most Important Tasks will be for that day. You’re putting yourself in danger of getting stuck in your e-mail and not getting out of it. Many people, however, have a hard time sticking with this rule of not checking e-mail first thing in the morning, because they’re addicted to e-mail. While this is a common problem, it can be beat. The first step is to be more aware of your e-mail usage—pause and give some thought before actually opening up e-mail. The next step is to make it a more conscious decision—think about whether you would rather check your e-mail, or achieve your goals. If you can focus on getting your important projects done, and advancing your One Goal, instead of checking e-mail, you will be that much closer to achieving your dreams.
• Turn off e-mail notifications. Most e-mail programs have a way to give you an alert (through a sound or a pop-up message or a blinking icon) that lets you know you’ve received a new e-mail. If you use such an alert, I highly recommend that you turn it off. It interrupts whatever you’re working on, and draws you back to e-mail based on the schedule of anyone who chooses to e-mail you, not at a time you determine. Instead, turn off alerts and only check e-mail at predetermined times. You’ll get a lot more done this way.
• How to stick to this habit. It’s easy to say that you should only check e-mail twice a day, but much harder to stick with it when constantly checking e-mail is an ingrained habit. How do you stick to the habit of checking e-mail less? You make it a priority for a week or two. Put up a sign with the rule: NO E-MAIL EXCEPT FOR 10 A.M. AND 4 P.M.! (or whatever schedule you choose). Every time you find yourself habitually switching to e-mail, stop yourself. Breathe. And then focus on your work instead. Your reward: You’ll get a lot more done.

REDUCE YOUR INCOMING STREAM

One of the most important parts of any e-mail strategy is to stop any unnecessary e-mail from getting into your in-box in the first place. Although I get hundreds of e-mails a day, most of those e-mails never make it to the in-box. They go straight to the spam folder or the trash. You only want the essential e-mails in your in-box, or you’ll be overwhelmed.

Here are some essential ways to reduce your incoming stream of e-mails:

 

1. Junk. I recommend using Gmail, as it has the best spam filter possible. I get zero spam in my in-box. That’s a huge improvement over my previous accounts at Yahoo, Outlook, and Hotmail, where I’d have to tediously mark dozens of e-mails as spam.

 

2. Notifications. I often get notifications from the many online services I use, from Amazon to WordPress to PayPal and many more. As soon as I notice those types of notifications filling up my in-box, I create a filter (or “rule” if you use Mail. app or Outlook) that will automatically put these into a folder and mark them as read, or trash them, as appropriate. So for my PayPal notifications, I can always go and check on them in my “payments” folder if I like, but they never clutter my in-box.

 

3. Batch work. I get certain e-mails throughout the day that require quick action (like ten to fifteen seconds each). As I know these e-mails pretty well, I created filters that send them into a “batch” folder to be processed once a day. It takes a couple minutes to process the whole folder, and I don’t have to see them in my in-box.

 

4. Stupid joke e-mails. If you have friends and family who send you chain e-mails and joke e-mails and the like, e-mail them and let them know that you are trying to lessen the huge amount of e-mail you have to deal with, and while you appreciate them thinking of you, you’d rather not receive those kinds of messages. Some people will be hurt. They’ll get over it. Others will continue to send the e-mails. I create a filter for them that sends them straight into the trash. Basically, they’re on my kill-file. If they ever send an important e-mail (which is rare), they’ll call me eventually and ask why I haven’t responded. I tell them that their e-mail must be in my spam folder.

 

5. Set expectations and publish policies. A great strategy for reducing e-mails is to pre-empt them by letting people know not to send you certain types of e-mails, and telling them where to go for commonly requested information. As most people who e-mail me get my contact info from my Web site, I’ve created a set of policies published on my site that are designed to pre-empt the most common e-mails. If people follow my policies, I will get very little e-mail. For example, instead of e-mailing me to ask for a link, they can save the link for me in a popular bookmarking service. For suggestions or comments or questions, they can post them on a couple of pages that I created for that purpose. I’m also planning on creating a Frequently Asked Questions page for more common questions and issues. These policies remove the burden on me to respond to every request—I still read the comments and questions, but I only respond if I have time. My in-box has been under a much lighter burden these days. For people who don’t have Web sites, they can still establish policies and a Frequently Asked Questions page by e-mailing them to other people, publishing them on the Web, or sending out a memo to coworkers.

PROCESS TO EMPTY

So now that only the essential e-mails come into your in-box, the question is how to get it empty in the least amount of time necessary. I’m usually able to empty my in-box in about twenty minutes, although your processing time may differ, depending on how practiced you are at the following methods, and how much e-mail you get, and how focused you keep yourself. However, in any case, you should be able to get your in-box empty in a minimal amount of time using these methods.

 

1. Temporary folder. If you have a very full in-box (hundreds or thousands of messages), you should create a temporary folder (“to be filed”) and get to them later, processing them perhaps thirty minutes at a time until they’ve all been taken care of. Start with an empty in-box, and use the following techniques to keep it empty, in as little time as possible.

 

2. Have an external to-do system. Many times the reason an e-mail is lingering in our in-box is because there is an action required in order to process it. Instead of leaving it in your in-box, and using the in-box as a de facto to-do list, make a note of the task required by the e-mail in your to-do system…a notebook, an online to-do program, a planner, whatever. Get the task out of your in-box. Make a reference to the e-mail if necessary. Then archive the e-mail and be done with it. This will get rid of a lot of the e-mail in your in-box very quickly. You still have to do the task, but at least it’s now on a legitimate to-do list and not keeping your in-box full.

 

3. Process quickly. Work your way from top to bottom, one e-mail at a time. Open each e-mail and dispose of it immediately. Your choices: delete, archive (for later reference), reply quickly (and archive or delete the message), put on your to-do list (and archive or delete), do the task immediately (if it requires two minutes or less—then archive or delete), or forward (and archive or delete). Notice that for each option, the e-mail is ultimately archived or deleted. Get it out of the in-box. Never leave it sitting there. And do this quickly, moving on to the next e-mail. If you practice this enough, you can plow through a couple dozen messages very quickly.

 

4. Be liberal with the delete key. Too often we feel like we need to reply to every e-mail. But we don’t. Ask yourself, “What’s the worst that will happen if I delete this?” If the answer isn’t too bad, just delete it and move on. You can’t reply to everything. Just choose the most important ones and reply to them. If you limit the e-mails you actually reply to or take action on, you get the most important stuff done in the least amount of time. The eighty-twenty rule at work.

 

5. Process to done. When you open your in-box, process it until you’re done. Don’t just look at an e-mail and leave it sitting in your in-box. Get it out of there, and empty that in-box. Make it a rule: Don’t leave the in-box with e-mails hanging around. Now your in-box should be empty and clean. Ahhh!

WRITE LESS

Another key to spending less time in e-mail but making the most of every e-mail you send is to write short but powerful e-mails. So after all the screening and spam filters, you’ve chosen the few e-mails you’re actually going to respond to…now don’t blow it by writing a novel-length response to each one. I limit myself to five sentences for each reply (at the maximum—many replies are even shorter). That forces me to be concise and to choose only the essentials of what I want to say, and limits the time I spend replying to e-mail.

Your limit might be different—perhaps a seven-sentence limit works better for you. Experiment with your limit for a few days to find your ideal length, and then do your best to stick to the limit. The key is in limitations: They force you to convey only the key concepts while limiting the amount of time you spend writing e-mails.