How to Manage Your Email
Here’s the thing.
In theory, I believe that email isn’t work. In my view, email isn’t a creation-based process that results in shipping your next product out the door, or writing your next book, or recording your next album. Email isn’t as creatively taxing as getting a project done, and email doesn’t add up hour after hour, day after day, to a completed project.
And so, for those reasons, I agree with folks who say that you should never email first thing in the morning. Instead, with those first few hours of peak energy that most of us have upon waking, we should focus on our most difficult task of the day, and get that done. This is not a new idea.
It’s a theory proposed in Eat that Frog: 21 Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time and in many other books on productivity. I even touch on it in my own ebook about creating a morning routine, The Present Principle: Seven Steps to Life in the Now. (I’ll go further into depth in my upcoming book, Greater Expectations: Succeed (and Stay Sane) in an On-Demand, All-Access, Always-On Age.)
But telling you when not to email isn’t suggesting you when you shouldrespond to emails. So when should you respond to emails, if not in the first few hours of the morning when you first turn on your computer?
I believe there are a few key times when it’s best to do real emailing. And by “real” emailing” I mean when you spend a chunk of time devoted to working through a bunch of emails, and not when you send a one-off urgent response to something from your iphone or from your computer while you’re typing furiously in a Word document to meet a deadline in another screen.
Here are the best times, according to yours truly:
- As much as possible, email should be done in bulk. There are always one-off exceptions to this rule, but in order to attain true productivity you need to slot the bulk of your emailing into specific times of the day – and preferably not too many times! The alternative, which most of us fall into the trap of, is doing our “real” work all day with email perpetually in the background, ready to interrupt our concentration and derail us for the most minor of emails.
- Email should be done when you have less energy, rather than more. So figure out when that is, whenever it is, and create a block of time in your schedule to fit in your emailing in that period. In my experience, the lull in the afternoon is a great time to go through a bunch of non-urgent emails.
- If you believe in multi-tasking (which I do, within certain limits), email can even be a great candidate for a multitasking activity. Try emailing while listening to a conference call (on mute), while wrangling a kiddo or two, while watching the news, or while monitoring the spaghetti sauce.
So when do you get the bulk of your emailing done? Do you agree that email should be done when you have less energy – not more? What have you found work for you in taming the email beast?
Digital Infrastructure Manager at Tuatahi First Fibre
8 年My email processing routine (thanks to those great books: Getting Things Done, and Total Workday Control with Microsoft Outlook) which I draw on twice a day when I'm feeling the mounting pressure of a growing mailbox... First - a mailbox rule that marks ALL incoming email as read. There's nothing quite as stressful as a mailbox full of BOLD EMAILS THAT ARE SCREAMING FOR MY ATTENTION :-) Ian's "Process email" task: Set timer (https://stopwatch.online-timers.com/multiple-stopwatches): 1. Set email client to work offline: puts a hold on incoming mail, and allows double-checking and sanity checks of outgoing mail for things that crop up later. 2. Append the volume of email in the InBox to the task subject line e.g. “Process email:78”. This allows tracking of email volume and processing time as the months go by – via the Email Processing task view). 3. Process all email: skim read, then decide: quick reply, delete, task it a. Quick replies are fine, but if any email is going to take more than a one line reply, make it into a task instead. Easiest to leave it in the Inbox and when email processing is complete, work through the emails left behind, turning them into tasks, tracking the time for each one to make sure they don’t become time hogs. b. Processing a big backlog (more than 20 messages)? First sort by Subject (i.e. conversation thread) and deal with the big blocks of email conversations in one go. This can help keep context and get through the email processing more quick as you don’t have to change mental gears so often. You can also leave a really long email conversation thread for the end, then manage it as a task, and time it. After getting rid of the large subject groups, sort by sender and deal with any info / FYI / junk mail messages, then finally sort by date and process from most recent to oldest. c. NB: If you have multiple email accounts for whatever reason, process the primary email location FIRST. That way any stuff forwarded from the secondary address/es to action in the primary email mailbox can be done as a timed and focussed task instead of having to be processed twice as an email. 4. Check outbox. If all outgoing email looks ok, put email client back online to deliver all mail. Whew - caught that smart alec remark I thought I'd sent to my younger brother, but had inadvertently addressed to the CEO.. 5. Now work through your Tasks. Sometimes I sit for a minute or so, staring at my empty inbox and wondering what to do now. Then I minimize that window, do a little dance, head off to my task list, and start work on the important stuff. :-) Ian
Senior Product Marketing Professional
8 年I'm surprised this article wasn't titled "5 best ways to control your email!" As you started by saying, "theory" is great! However, I've never, ever, heard email management advice that held up to the real world and this was no different really. Yes, you can try to be the change-leader and get everyone in your organisation to respect your email work-ethic however, all this usually achieves is angry colleagues, you begin o garner a reputation as a 'slow-responder' and to top it off, there is very little improvement in productivity as the email gets replaced with phone calls. "I emailed you about an hour ago, I really need to know..." Quite often, this will then have you stop what you're doing, and go off in search for an answer to the question that you may have dealt with an hour ago. I get the whole email productivity issue, but with most things of this nature, real change can only really be achieved from a top-down method at a cultural and perhaps even technology level.
hello, i agree With this post and i'll only add 1 key point to the bulk handling off e-mails... i sort them in 4 categories.... urgent and important,important,urgent,non important non urgent then i handle then in the priorité order list. for instance urgent and important are production incident,manager mail. important : stakeholders mail adressed to me colleagues mail adressed to me. urgent: some mail important for m'y colleagues or my teams non important non urgent: mail not directly adressed to me( i'm in cc) and i read or answer to mail from 2 nd categories when 1st category is done...
Global C-suite Publicist & Strategist (Cybersecurity & Webdev pioneer, Author, Biochemist, Journalist) ??
8 年Good post as a reminder not to give too much priority to emails or risk it ruining our productivity. There are better tools for project management and collaboration than email or messaging apps. Many emails belong to one of these anyway ~ spam, affirmation only, FYI, etc, and so clearing them quickly in bulk is wise.
Senior Product Designer || B2B, B2C, B2B2C / ex-Disney / UX, UI, Product / SaaS / Design Systems / Mentor / neverguesswhat.com
8 年I agree with allocating time in the day to read and reply to emails. if i am doing non focused work ill quickly read the subject as the email alert hits my screen and decide if i need to reply otherwise i'll flick notifications off on my mac (https://osxdaily.com/2012/08/10/turn-off-notification-center-in-os-x-temporarily/) and do focused, uninterrupted work. then when i am ready, ill go through the emails i received and reply to them, star them for a later reply or delete them.