Tick Tock Tuesday/Emails, Emails and More Emails

Do you sometimes feel over-run and overwhelmed by the amount of email that comes to your inbox everyday? I know I am. Email is probably one of my biggest organizing issues. I am really bad at subscribing to every newsletter about every topic known to man. And when I get all of those newsletters and my inbox says it’s got 555 emails, I feel lost.

I don’t want to delete them. What if I need them to reference back to someday? But do I ever remember that one little thing I read in that newsletter from what’s his face? No!

So this Tick Tock Tuesday is as much for you as it is for me! Today we are going to go over some simple tips to keeping your inbox manageable. I’ll be pulling in some advice from Jeremy Wright’s time management series as well as from Julie Morgenstern who wrote the book “Never Check Email in the Morning“.

Here are 3 quick tips from Jeremy over at Ensight that I thought were great. Later in his series, he plans on dedicating a whole article to email. I’m looking forward to that one!

1. Most decent email programs will let you “transform” an email into something more useful. In Outlook, you can drag an email onto your calendar and it will automatically be transformed into an appointment. Just change the date and time and you’re set! No more keeping upcoming meetings in your inbox!

2. Your inbox is just like your kitchen table. If your wife is anything like mine, she doesn’t appreciate having 15,323 pieces of mail on her kitchen table. And while some people think moving the file to a chair in the living room (ie: another folder) solves the issue, it actually just makes it worse when it comes time to fix things. So if you’re going to put things in a different folder, do it properly. 2 quick rules for folders: a) Put together a structure that makes sense for your whole life. 3 good top level folders include: Work Critical, Work Reference and Personal and b) whatever structure you use for email, mirror that structure in your “My Documents” (or wherever you store your stuff on your computer) on your computer AND in your filing system. This will ensure that if you know you received a “something” but don’t know if it was physical or virtual, that you can find it quickly.

3. When you turn on the computer in the morning, doing “passes” through your inbox can often speed up your processing. I use 5 passes: a) delete junkmail, b) read short stuff that’s purely informational and then delete it (I know I probably won’t go back and read it later, but if I really want to I can file it under Work Reference), c) things I can reply to quickly (less than 2 minutes), I do, d) file away anything that doesn’t require you to DO SOMETHING and e) book appointments into my calendar. You don’t need to do it this way, or even do all of these steps. For me, this allows me to get through the 1000+ items in my inbox every morning in 10-15 minutes, often leaving me with just 5-10 “new” items since I last saw my inbox.

I really like his 5 passes routine. That’s something I need to get into the routine of doing, instead of the “read all the personal ones and save the other miscellaneous ones for when I have more time to read them later” routine. It’s a failed plan. It doesn’t work! As I have said before, later never seems to come.

Here is a tip from Julie Morgenstern:

Don’t look at E-mail first thing. Instead, use the morning to focus on your most important tasks. Most people’s minds are sharpest in the morning, and completing important responsibilities before lunch creates a sense of relief and accomplishment that can carry you through the afternoon.

Helpful: When you reply to an E-mail, try to fit your entire response in the subject line. Some people waste hours each day crafting long responses when short ones are all that’s needed.

Alright, so what do you think of that “Don’t look at email first thing” rule? For me now, it just wouldn’t work. When I was working a full time job though, I took that rule to heart. When I got to my job I did the things that took the most thought, the most brain juice and the most energy. My job required a lot of planning and coordinating and seeing to it that all of the events flowed properly. I could not have done that in the afternoon, right after I had eaten lunch. I just am not at my best then.

So when I was in that situation, I did not check my email when I first got there. I would usually do that right before I went to lunch or right after I got back. Now, I am weird because I love checking my email. I’m sure I’m not the only one who looks forward to the inbox. Right? I hope not.

Anyway, my life now is a little bit different. I work from home and my “assistant” can be so needy. I’ve tried firing him but he is just so darn cute! Okay, okay…my assistant is 3, but he is really cute.

My time is extrememly limited in the morning. The first thing I do when I get up (Ms. Morgenstern, please close your ears) is check my email. Then I get the two older ones ready for school, send them off to the bus and then I turn around to a 3 year old who is ready to P-L-A-Y!

I actually do all of my work that needs some brain power (like this here article) after the kids go to bed. It’s just what works for me and I wouldn’t change it for the world. I love working from home.

So my point in saying ALL of that is: what works for me might not work for you and vise versa.

To wrap this up I would like you to read this excerpt from Gina Trapani of Lifehacker. She is talking about email and how she, and the rest of the team, had to end up dealing with the email dilemma.

Get your priorities straight

It doesn’t feel like it – especially at the beginning of what seems like a long work day – but your time is limited. There are only a certain amount of hours in the day, but there are an unlimited number of things you could work on. Make sure you work on the most important tasks.

Recently we had to make a tough decision here at Lifehacker. For the past year we’ve prided ourselves on the fact that we responded to every email that appeared in the Lifehacker inbox. Over time, the amount of messages we receive each day kept increasing into the hundreds, and even though we’d applied every shortcut in the book to our process, it took us more and more time to get through the onslaught of messages.

When the amount of time we spent processing email started to cut into the the time we spend writing posts, something had to give. A post benefits all of Lifehacker’s readership, where an email only benefits the recipient, and we’ve only got so much time. So, we decided to reduce our responses to only the messages which absolutely need one to focus on keeping the site fresh. This was a very difficult compromise to make, but posts are more important than email responses. It’s as simple as that.

If any of you have some tips on taming your email, please do share.