The pace of the world today is hectic. Why is it so much faster than that of yesteryear? Why is "Island Time" so much more relaxed? It comes down to communication. The world moves at the speed of communciation. When all communication was written in ink on a page and carried in a sack by a horse; everything moved slower. Then came faster horses, then faxes, emails and now WhatsApp, Slack and Zoom. The good news is that we can't get communication happening much faster than it does now, so my prediction is that the world won't keep getting faster and more hectic. Phew, because I don't think I could keep up. How do you manage your emails? I am the active founder of 4-6 businesses, angel investor in a dozen more, on the board of a few companies and mentor at 3 universities. Plus I have personal matters to deal with like anyone else. So yes, I expect I receive more emails than the average person... sometimes I can get many hundreds of emails a day. I often get asked why I'm not drowning in email. Here's my method. Inbox Zero It all starts with the goal of Inbox Zero - this is what my inbox looks like right now: Zero emails in my Inbox, a relaxing Sunday night and plenty of time to write a blog post. But how? I just found a business training document I wrote in 2007 which talked about managing emails - it is a discipline which takes practice! 1. Touch each email ONCE I'm old enough to have read books and listened to seminars by self-help guru Brian Tracy. I expanded his strategy for dealing with Paper on your Desk to apply to emails. Re-reading emails is one of the biggest wastes of time ever! Leaving emails in your inbox means you read, or glance at them, again and again and again. Some I'm sure you've seen 50 or 100 times and still done nothing about. Be absolutely ruthless and look at each email ONCE only! This ABCD technique was what I used in 2007 for each email (or paper document): A Take Action, immediately deal with it (then archive it) B Bin – if it isn’t going to be useful, throw it away! Delete it! C Classify – file it where it can be found when needed (archive) D Delegate to the appropriate person (forward and archive) These days I don't bother with classifying or filing emails. Gmail has an Archive button and any email which isn't deleted gets archived. If I need it then I use the search and can find it way more easily than if I'd put a label on it and filed it into some folder I need to browse. Gmail's search is very powerful and I am always able to find the email I'm looking for. Touch each email once, then get it out of your inbox by archiving it. 2. Check your email This might sound a bit weird, but I'm saying you should schedule a time to check your email and NOT have it open on your phone or desktop all day. If you get notifications from your Inbox, turn them off. Notifications are a distraction from your focus on priority matters. I usually check my email at the start of my day - allocating up to 2 hours to deal with everything. Productivity improves dramatically 15 minutes after you start something, and declines when you start to tire, after 1-2 hours depending on your stamina. I check again just after lunch (only half-hour allocation) and then finally another hour on emails before I sign-out for the day. My goal is to sign-out each day with an empty inbox. Inbox zero. If "doing your emails" is your priority task then you'll give it your full focus and actually be able to deal with the emails. If you have other priorities then you'll end up reading your emails and thinking "I've no time to reply now"... if you didn't give yourself time to reply, why are you reading it in the first place? 3. Your inbox is a list of small Things To Do Each tool you use must be 'fit for purpose'. Emails are not for chatting, for that use a messenger program. Emails are not for remembering to got to a meeting, for that use a calendar. Your Email Inbox is a list of things to do - but each of those items should take you between 5 and 45 minutes to complete. You must be able to open the email once, take action, complete the task and archive the email. If the email is asking you to write a book - it's not something which should stay in your inbox. For larger tasks create a card on your Trello Board or other Work prioritization tool. If that email asks you to write a book then reply you would create the Card on your Trello board, maybe link to the email, then archive the email. Once you finish your book you can easily find the email and hit reply. 4. Unsubscribe from stuff Almost every interaction you make on the web ends up with your email address being on a subscriber list. If you are deleting an email, there is a good chance you might want to unsubscribe as well. Believe me, the fraction of a second investment in unsubscribing now will save you hours of receiving, opening and deleting emails in the future. Invest a little effort now to save a lot in the future. And not just with email - delayed gratification is the pathway to riches. Priority Inbox Gmail is very smart - and it learns from your behaviour. Take advantage of this. Sometimes you don't have enough time to deal with all your emails in one session, so which ones will you leave behind? Having them prioritized for you makes it easy ... deal with the Important stuff first, everything else can come later. These are my custom Settings for the Priority Inbox. I have no emails in my inbox, so it's hard to show you - but the four sections expand when you have emails. I usually have them hide automatically when there are no emails in that section. Snooze for a timely reminder Some emails are time sensitive. Don't leave them sitting in your inbox where they clog up your working memory and force you to look at them every time you check your email. Get every email out of your inbox after one touch.... Snooze the email to show up in your inbox right at the time when you do need to deal with it! You can see my Snoozed emails here... a few are set to show up on Monday morning when I can deal with them - I just didn't want them clogging up my inbox during the weekend. One is for an event starting on Tuesday, so it will show up on Tuesday, a couple I even emailed myself as a reminder to pickup something or do some regulatory task at a specific date. And one is a financial check which I need to remember to do at the end of the year. The key takeaway is to use email as a To Do list, and Snooze is much easier than adding a Calendar reminder (calendar appointments are only to remind me that I need to be somewhere at a particular place and a time). Quick scan of Spam Things do end up in Spam, so every week or two I'll have a quick scan through all the emails which have been caught by the Spam box. Sometimes I'll find things which aren't really Spam and I'll reclassify them. Then you know what I do? I empty the Spam box! I want even SpamBox Zero. :) Send + Archive
Make sure you have this setting turned on. 99% of the time you should be clicking Send and Archive - then you can quickly move to the next item in your Inbox (list of things to do). Very rarely will you send an email reponse and leave the email in your inbox for futher action. Each email should be touched only once. If you don't see this button, go into Settings and turn it on.
2 Comments
Joanna
21/11/2022 08:50:49 am
Totally works. David first introduced this technique to me 2 years ago and - without much exaggeration - it changed my life. Now I control my inbox, it doesn't control me anymore!
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