Email is Breaking Us

I recently returned from my annual required five days out of the office where I have as little foundation contact as possible. No approving any fund movements, no signing off on transactions, no executing any documents, etc. I believe we require these five consecutive days away for security and audit purposes, but I bring it up today because it’s the one week of the year where I really do avoid my email inbox. I’m looking at it right now. And here’s how I’m feeling:

On average, I’m getting a couple hundred emails per day if I am only counting my Foundation inbox. The per day total here includes (theoretically) lighter email on weekend and holiday days and does not include calendar-related flows. Historically, I’ve been a huge fan of “inbox zero”: sorting, deleting or otherwise clearing unread emails such that action items are captured and my time is spent focused on highest priority tasks. Inbox zero in the face of this new volume, however, seems like it may no longer be a realistic goal, or even a good use of my time.??

Email is not just breaking me; it’s also hitting my entire team. I have had several one-on-one conversations with my team members about managing incoming emails, and the inbox volume conversation has become a regular topic during our Monday and Wednesday staff meetings. At a team lunch in late June, Casey Shultz confessed to her total unread messages of 238, apparently assuming she was alone in the triple digits. Nope! Kiaksar Safarpour turned out to have a couple hundred more. As Casey waltzed out feeling “less bad” about her inbox and very “seen”, I had to wonder: what’s going on here? And what can we do about it??

According to Statista, the number of email users was about 4 billion in 2020, and is expected to rise to 4.6 billion by 2025. More than half the global population now uses email. Email continues to be the tool of choice for business communications, despite the rise of messaging apps and other services. The chart below, also from Statista, shows the anticipated trajectory of email volumes, which are expected to come in around 376 billion by 2025:?

That projection represents a 23% increase in email volume from 2020, and a 40% increase from 2017!??

Notably, these projections were released in 2021, so they do not include (or even conceive of) developments in AI and the large language models (LLMs) like Chat-GPT4. I don’t know about you, but I’m experimenting with email response templates to speed up my efficiency in dealing with email. And if I’m using AI to respond to messages, I definitely know that you all are as well. I cannot even speculate what the volume of AI generated messages must be so far in 2023, but I suspect the chart above may show exponential email volume growth beginning this year.??

Here's the thing: if we are all sending each other automated emails generated by LLMs, what’s the point of reading them anymore? My old inbox zero strategy was pretty simple: I’d scan the sender and the first line of content in each email. If it was from someone I know, and was specific to me, I’d open it and sort it. If it was generic and not from a direct contact of mine, it would be immediately archived or deleted.

Now, I can’t always tell if the email is actually personalized to me, or if it’s been “personalized” by a sender’s AI tools. The result: inbox volume is rising, and we’re all spending more time sorting through each message.?

I spent some time this weekend searching for solutions, and what I found was a whole pile of garbage! Seemingly the sum total of the internet’s solutions for managing email consists of this best practices document from Microsoft, which was originally written for Outlook 2013! It has been repurposed and repackaged for Gmail and Yahoo Mail (does anyone even use that?) and turned into clickbait by AI on every business website I could find. Ah, the irony…?

Anyway, here’s the ”best practice” list circa 2013, pre-LLM (for what it’s worth):?

• Reduce the number of places where you read messages. If you're using a new version of Microsoft 365, you can use Focused Inbox for Outlook to automatically separate the types of messages you're most likely to read right away from other messages.?
• Let some messages pass by. Use rules to send the messages that you don't need to read right away into their own folders. Such as folders for projects or Contact Group folders. You don’t need to — and in high volume situations probably can’t — read every message sent to you.?
• Reduce the number of places where you manually file messages. Reduce the mental tax of filing by relying on search to locate messages.?
• Process your messages by using the Four Ds. When reading your messages, decide whether to:?
• Delete it.?
• Do it (respond or file for reference).?
• Delegate it (forward).?
• Defer it (using categories and flags) for a second review in your task list.?
• Reduce your to-do list to one list. Use a single to-do list and a single calendar to manage what you need to do.?
• Work in batches. Use categories to help you group similar tasks together.?
• Use good judgment when sending messages. Follow the do’s and don’t's of writing great messages.?
• Review your calendar and tasks regularly.?

The best part? The Microsoft header on this list states that it is intended for people who work for a large company with an IT department and receive more than 30 emails a day. Har-har ??.??

So, readers, I’m coming to you for solutions today. What are you folks doing to deal with the email apocalypse that seems to get worse by the day? Is there a particular strategy that’s working great for you right now? Or are we all gradually moving to a #selectalldelete YOLO and moving on to something else? Throw your ideas (or commiserations) in the comments!?