I spend a good part of my time helping people to regain control of their e-mail accounts, by showing them proven time management and organisation strategies focused on their e-mail activities. The results are often dramatic, with people actually finding the bottom of their inbox and getting to “e-mail zero”. There is also an often unexpected side benefit from this process – an overall significant reduction in “life stress,” as one of the major professional stressors in life gets alleviated.
The process I usually walk people through to regain control of their e-mail is fairly simple. First, I talk to them about good basic strategies for handling new e-mails:
1. If the task inside the e-mail will take you three minutes or less to handle, just do it now! I learned this classic from Mr. GTD, David Allen, nearly 20 years ago, and it has been a staple in my time management arsenal. Don’t let the quick little things stack up – keep them moving, and get them out of the way. As David so eloquently said 20 years ago, if you look at something that will only take you three minutes 3-5 times before acting on it, you have effectively doubled the amount of time it takes to get it done.
2. If the task inside the e-mail takes longer than three minutes, convert the e-mail into a task on your task list. Rather than keeping these e-mails in your inbox, making your inbox a de facto and highly disorganised task list, move them into your actual task list, with appropriate and needed information, and get them out of your inbox. That way, you are not spending time re-reading messages over and over again before acting on them – you administer them much more efficiently in a prioritised task list than a disorganised inbox.
3. Once done or tasked, file or delete! Once you’ve either completed the task in an e-mail or at least identified it, why is that e-mail still in your inbox? Get it out of there by either simply deleting the message or filing in a subfolder (and if you don’t have a good subfolder to file that message in, create it!) This is how you keep your inbox close to zero – act on the quick little ones, task the longer ones, and then file or delete both!
4. Don’t check your e-mail all day long! Many people check their e-mail the minute they receive a new message. This is a horribly distracting behaviour that can actually negatively affect your IQ. Rather than maintaining your focus and getting high-level work priorities completed, you instead are acting at the whim of your e-mail and those sending e-mails to you. Retake control of your work (and life) and start following a more specific regimen – only check a few times a day — spaced out appropriately so you are reasonably responsive, yet so you also have time to get significant project-based work done. If you are a “client servant”, then you might need to check more often, whereas project managers probably need to check less often, but the key point is – don’t check “right now” as new messages come in.
Once you have these basic day-to-day e-mail strategies down, you can go after your “legacy” e-mails. I often find people with hundreds or even thousands of messages just sitting in their inbox. Of course, if you follow the strategies listed above, you realise you don’t really need to be storing those e-mails in your inbox. If you’ve got hundreds or thousands of legacy e-mails to deal with, I recommend you block a half- or even full-day. If you have about 200 or less messages, just go through them one by one following the process described above. Try to do this on a day when you are likely not to be getting a large number of new e-mails – maybe a weeknight or possibly a weekend – that way you can actually work on the old messages. I’d recommend this process:
1. Go through all e-mails to simply delete those that can now be deleted, and file those that need to be filed (and if you don’t have a good folder to file them to, create it!) This should be your first pass.
2. Then, deal with all “3-minute or less” e-mails – get those quick little ones done, and then don’t let them stack up on you any more – from this point forward, act on them now.
3. Look at the clock – how much time do you have left from your designated time for your e-mail clean-up process? If more than about half an hour, then change your “3-minute rule” to a 5-10 minute rule, and go after all of those “slightly longer than 3-minute e-mails” so you can knock out as much e-mail volume as possible that day.
4. Spend the last half hour “tasking” any remaining e-mails that were neither filed, deleted, or completed. If you do this properly, you should be able to get to zero.
Now, if you have significantly more than 250 e-mails, in my new book, Taming the E-mail Beast, I talk about identifying and moving your newest e-mails, sorting the older e-mails, and then filing or deleting based on this sorting process. With a bit of time invested (usually a day or less), even people with very cluttered inboxes can regain significant control of their e-mail account and activities.
This may seem like a small step toward time management and work-life sanity, but really, it is an important step. I’ve heard in the past that the best thing you can do when feeling overwhelmed is to “clean out a closet”. It is a task that, with singular focus, you can actually accomplish, and that provides you a sense of some control. When you think about it, your e-mail inbox is really nothing more than a messy closet – but a very important closet in regards to your professional life. Spend some time getting that e-mail “closet” cleaned up and regain a big part of your sanity and improve your time management. And use that as a mechanism for decreasing your overall stress and overwhelm in your life. I promise you this – if you get your e-mail under control, you will feel much more in control of your total work projects and tasks. This will reduce the unnecessary worry you have about your work, thus allowing you to enjoy your life quite a bit more.
