By Dr. Barrett Mosbacker
October 28, 2018
Email is the black hole of productivity. It is also a paradox. On the one hand, it is a boon to productivity. It eliminates back-and-forth missed calls and voice messages, reduces the time required to schedule meetings, and provides an easily searchable document trail for future reference. On the other hand, email continually threatens to pull us into the black hole of the incessantly urgent but not always necessary. It subjects us to the constant gravitational pull of the immediate, sapping our energy and preoccupying us while we neglect what is truly important. Email allows others to write on our to-do list, and it is relentless — we never fully catch up.
Taming the Email Beast
Email can be tamed and harnessed. If you follow these simple steps, you can increase productivity and reduce stress and distraction.
If you have hundreds or thousands of emails in your inbox, get rid of them. Do not use your inbox as a reminder or to-do list. Seeing hundreds or thousands of emails in your inbox produces mental stress and makes it easy to miss important messages.
You may need to schedule several hours on your calendar for this project. Start by quickly scanning the subject and sender lines of the emails in your inbox and immediately delete or archive those you do not need, including marketing emails and unsolicited blasts. Delete emails you will never need and archive those you may need to reference in the future. This step will drastically reduce the volume of email in your inbox and the mental stress that comes with opening it.
Set up rules in your email application. It takes only a few minutes to learn how to create rules so that your email application can automatically pre-process messages for you. For example, I have a rule for emails addressed to “undisclosed recipients” that moves them to the Archive folder and marks them as read, so I never see them and am never distracted by them. I also have a rule that sends any “out of office” reply directly to the trash. I currently have twenty-two such rules running automatically in my email client.
Immediately mark junk email as junk or spam and create a rule to redirect future messages from that sender. Taking a few seconds to do this will save significant time going forward. Most email clients learn from these actions and will automatically divert such messages away from your inbox.
Schedule time in your day to bulk-process email. I recommend thirty minutes two to three times a day — morning, midday, and afternoon. Do not check email constantly. Doing so places you on a never-ending treadmill and pulls your attention toward the urgent at the expense of the important.
Compose new emails outside your email application. Writing new emails in volume at a set time is more efficient than composing them throughout the day. I write many of mine in a separate notes or text application rather than directly in my email client. The advantage is that it prevents you from being drawn away by new incoming messages when your intent was simply to compose and send. Write the email, send it, and return to your work.
Respond to all emails that are not junk and have not been automatically processed. Do your best to answer every email addressed directly to you, even if only to write “Thank you.” My rule of thumb is to respond within twenty-four hours. Begin with the most recent and work your way down. Save lengthy articles or attachments for a designated reading time rather than opening them during your processing window.
Do not leave emails in your inbox. When emails remain in the inbox, you re-read them each time you open your mail and waste time deciding how to handle them. Either delete the message or move it to an organized folder — archive, waiting, read later, someday, travel, person-specific, project-specific, and so on. If an email requires more than a quick response or more than a couple of minutes to act upon, route it to your project application to address later. The goal is to empty the inbox every time you bulk-process.
Know when and when not to use email. Do not use email to deliver negative feedback or to respond to it. Email is well suited for transactional exchanges, sharing information, and expressing appreciation. For anything else, you are better off calling or speaking face to face.
As a general practice, I do not engage in an email thread of more than three replies. If a conversation requires more than three exchanges, it is time to pick up the phone or meet in person. A well-written email takes time to compose — save yourself and the other person that time by talking rather than staying on the email treadmill.
If email is consuming your time and productivity, try the approach outlined above. A measure of structure and discipline may be the difference between email serving as a tool for productivity and email becoming a source of stress and lost focus.
Control your email — do not let it control you.
