Almost all of us use email. Most of us spend several hours a day in it. Are you sure it has to be that way? Here are a few of my thoughts on it.
Email is an incredibly convenient way to communicate. At the same time, it is very often used extremely inefficiently.
One day I caught myself “spending” most of my working day in email and using it instead of a task manager (a to-do list). Wait, shouldn’t tasks be ordered by priority, not by how fresh they are? It turns out I was always working only on the tasks that had just arrived. It turns out that to get me to do something, a colleague had to remind me of their problem as often as possible. And then we wonder where this constant stream of requests and reminders in our inboxes comes from.
Email is a bad task manager. Don’t use email to keep your to-do list. At least not without some extra setup. What about emails that need action? I try to stick to the GTD methodology. Below I describe what I do.
We tend to grab whatever is in front of our eyes and so lose sight of what matters. Email feeds our ego and our brain a constant stream of signals. It’s like a drug. You need to wean yourself off it. Don’t keep an email tab open, and certainly don’t turn on sound or visual notifications for new messages. You don’t need to react instantly to every email that arrives, unless that’s exactly what you’re paid for (an account manager, say).
Let’s break the problem into parts. First, the correspondence with colleagues.
Convince your colleagues to use a project management system and talk there. We use Podio.com. Ideally, email stays a way to talk only to the outside world (everyone you can’t pull into your project system). And that doesn’t necessarily include customers and contractors.
We’ve already filtered out some of the long emails by moving them into the project management system. What about the rest?
Teach the people around you email etiquette. Here, for example, are some of the rules I teach our staff:
I think the first step will do it.
The answer is similar to the previous one. Write down and announce your SLA, a service level agreement: how soon you plan to answer which kinds of messages. That gives you how often you need to process your email, which is exactly where we’re heading. If necessary, let people mark emails as urgent by putting something like #Urgent in the subject.
By the way, you can set up a filter for this tag that marks such emails with a bright label.
The inbox in your email is your inbox in GTD terms. It needs to be cleared regularly, in one sitting, once or several times a day (or a week, if you’re really good).
Processing goes like this. You open the first email and decide what it is:
A tip. Never close an email without deciding what to do with it.
Another tip. A quick reply works really well before you set yourself a task like “Reply to Vasya about the diesel generator”. Write something like:
Hi Vasya. Thanks for the info. I’ll think it over and get back to you within 2 days. Stas.
I call these emails one-liners: I write them in one line, without the pleasantries. These short holding replies are a very useful, simple habit.
To process email comfortably, it helps to set it up. I’ll use Gmail as the example, since I don’t use any other service. It’s worth turning on the experimental features (Settings → Labs).
You archive an email and the next (older) message opens right away instead of the inbox. And so on until it’s cleared. Genius, in my opinion.
I use shortcuts for:
1 key) and deleting (shift+1) emails;shift+> and shift+<);Z key);Shortcuts are set up rather clumsily in Gmail, but then they save a lot of time. It’s handy that you can set a shortcut in two keyboard layouts, Z and Я, so it works whatever language you’re typing in.
When I realized I kept looking at only two labels, I added the emails labeled “To do” and “Waiting for reply” to the main page of my mailbox.
First we see everything unprocessed in the inbox, below it the folder of to-dos (I set it to show at most 25 emails), and below that the ones waiting for a reply.
It’s simply convenient to be able to take back an email sent by accident.
As the feature’s description says, smart labels classify emails themselves, trying to guess what each is about. And you help them by labelling emails by hand. It’s convenient to move all newsletters, emails from services and the like into the “Promotions” label and set up a filter that archives all of them.
You mark the first email of an automated series from a new service and never see the rest. You don’t unsubscribe, and when you need to, you look through them all at once, one after another.
This worked before Gmail introduced tabs, and it works for me now. I don’t use the tabs (categories), because they kept tempting me to check what was new there and get stuck for an hour or two in newsletters from Megaplan and the like. The “Updates” tab seemed useful, but then I thought: if I want to know about something on time (it’s a notification, after all!), I want it in my inbox. If not, I should turn those notifications off.
If the email you’re processing turns out to be a reminder about an upcoming event you don’t want to miss, it’s handy to add the event to your calendar right from your email. I also have our office duty calendar connected, so I always see who’s on shift today.
I think the name says it all. Templates save time. Make them: sharpen your saw, kid. I personally use templates through the AutoCorrect feature of Punto Switcher, but it’s tied to my work computer. Gmail is at hand anywhere.
Now for what didn’t work for me. For a long time I carefully classified emails by project, supplier, product category and likelihood of working together. And I almost never used that system. Search inside email works great. Here are examples of advanced search operators. Most often I search for correspondence with a particular person by typing from:email into the search box.
Here, on the other hand, is when I really did rely on labels:
*@company_domain)from:(supplier_email1 OR supplier_email2 OR …))Lately, two things have changed my working day for the better: reaching inbox zero (clean, orderly email) and turning off the sound on my phone. I recommend both.
This piece was first published on Medium under the title “What email is and what it’s for (don’t laugh, I’m serious)”.