I’ve seen a few reports that say kids these days think e-mail is passé. Heh. That may be, but for people who have actual work to do, the inbox remains the center of the universe. And I have some tricks to help you take that universe in the palm of your hand and utterly dominate it–you know, just in case e-mail doesn’t go the way of the telegraph anytime soon.
Like many of you, I field hundreds of incoming e-mail messages each day. Processing them all–from opening the inbox to making good decisions about which items to act on, which to file for reference, which to delete, and which to mark as spam–takes more than just time and energy. It takes planning. Here are some useful tactics to add to your e-mail strategy so you can tame your inbox and work more productively.
1. Zero your inbox.
When was the last time your inbox was completely empty? Most people haven’t seen an uncluttered inbox since they set up their mail account. And that’s a shame, because attaining the state known colloquially as “inbox zero” is one of the most liberating experiences a person can have in the Internet age.
It’s a transient feeling, of course, because new messages are likely to arrive at any minute. But if you process everything in your inbox effectively and strategically, you can keep your list of pending messages down to a manageable size throughout the day and shut down your PC with the knowledge that, though new messages may come in overnight, you’ve addressed everything that came your way today.
Many of the tips in this article are designed to help you achieve this blissful state of emptiness. But make no mistake: If you really want to master your mail fully, an empty inbox should be among your daily objectives.
2. Use folders sparingly.
The purpose of folders is to make old messages easy to find, and the more folders you have, the less successfully they fulfill that purpose. When your folder list gets so long that you can’t see all of them all in one glance, you’re unlikely to maintain adequate awareness of what’s in them, which ones require attention, and which are just storing aging detritus. So avoid having more folders than you need for tracking active projects.
Use whatever folders you keep as “trusted buckets” (in the parlance of Getting Things Done author David Allen) that you check periodically during their useful life. For instance, I have an HR folder where I keep important documents and messages from our human resources department that I know I’ll need to refer to later. I have an Invoices folder that holds new invoices that require my attention, and so on. I review the contents of these folders about once a week and remove any messages that have been adequately addressed or are no longer relevant.
Every message worth keeping that doesn’t go into one of my seven or eight active folders gets archived in Gmail, and is available via a quick search. Pulling up a three-year-old message from my boss about an important past project that we want to revisit or refer to usually takes me only about 20 seconds with a search. Hunting through dozens of cluttered folders in my sidebar might take 10 minutes or more–and might not turn up the needed message at all.
3. Use filters sparingly.
Filters are also good for gathering messages about an important project or event into one place for quick perusal. For example, I’ll be attending the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, and my inbox is starting to fill up with e-mail notes from people who want to meet me at the show or tell me about the products they’re announcing. Because these incoming messages roll in at a fairly brisk clip, I’ve set up a filter top prevent them from reaching my inbox at all, instead diverting them to a special CES folder. I can peruse the contents of this folder once a day and respond to messages about the show without letting it dominate my work life for a month in advance.
Unfortunately, overuse of filters can be just as counterproductive as overreliance on folders. Letting filters handle too much of your incoming mail invites you to lose track of what’s passing through your inbox. If you have 20 filters sending messages to 20 different folders, there’s no way you can stay on top of what’s coming in.
Several of my colleagues use folders and filters to capture messages from specific people into folders dedicated to just that sender. They swear by it, but they also seem to miss more than their fair share of messages. When I say “Hey, I didn’t hear back from you about that e-mail I sent the other day,” they invariably grab their mouse and click the folder with my name on it to go looking for the message. And sure enough, it’s there, two days old, unread. Overfiltering is a problem.
Next page: When to respond from scratch, and when canned replies work
4. Delete first, read the surviving messages later.
Most of the e-mail you get is probably garbage. Not spam, necessarily, but useless to you and unworthy of your attention even for a moment. This is doubly likely to be true if you’ve let online retailers add you to their mailing lists while making a quick purchase, thereby ensuring an unending flow of daily marketing messages that you’ve signed up for but don’t want.
Instead of scrolling through your inbox at the start of the day, looking for important messages in deep drifts of junk, give yourself a little psychological relief by deleting the obviously worthless items first. It’s astonishing how you can start the day with 80 messages in your inbox, and winnow it down to 15 within 5 minutes or so. Disposing of the clutter feels good, and it requires very little effort.
When you’re out and about, you can trim down the size of your inbox by using your phone‘s mail client to scout and delete unwanted messages. While mobile interfaces aren’t really ideal for composing messages, they’re great for scrolling quickly through your message list and weeding out the undesirables.
5. Take action immediately.
When you open an e-mail message, do something with it right away. If it’s junk or if it just isn’t worth keeping around for some other reason, delete it without further ado. If it’s worth keeping but requires no further action, file it in a trusted folder or archive it so you can search for it later if you ever need to.
Use the 2-minute rule: If a message requires action from you that you can complete in less than 2 minutes (such as typing a reply and hitting Send), do it at once. Then file, archive, or delete the message and move on.
If the message requires action from someone else, delegate it by hitting Forward and sending it to the person who needs to act on it. If you need to track the item to ensure that it gets done, file it into a folder labeled ‘Waiting For’ so you can follow up on it later if you need to. (It’s a good idea to check the contents of your ‘Waiting For’ folder at the end of each day.)
Some messages require action on a specific date or at a particular time. For handling those messages, I use a new service called Nudgemail, which lets me defer a message by forwarding it to an address such as tomorrow@nudgemail.com. Nudgemail sends the message back to me on the date or time specified in the address, so I can deal with it then. It’s a great way to keep an inbox at zero without losing track of time-sensitive messages.
12/3 UPDATE: As of today, Nudgemail has added a recurring-reminder feature that lets you send yourself reminders on an automatically repeating schedule, such as daily@nudgemail.com or everyfriday@nudgemail.com. This can come in really handy when your boss hands you a new responsibility that you need to build into your routine.
If a nonurgent message requires action from you or some sort of follow-up that you can’t complete in 2 minutes, defer it until you have the time. In such a case, you need to capture the task in another system such as a calendar, a to-do list, a trusted folder in your sidebar, or a wire inbox on your desk. Wherever you put it, make sure it’s a place that you are sure to come back to. After you’ve committed to taking action and captured your commitment in a trusted place, get the message out of your inbox and move on.
Don’t let mail become a constant distraction during your workday. When you need to concentrate on a project, the constant inflow of new messages can easily lure you away from the task at hand. But e-mail is not instant messaging, and there’s generally very little expectation that you’ll respond immediately to any given message.
To give yourself uninterrupted blocks of time, set your mail client to refresh every 30 minutes or so, not every 1 to 5 minutes. If you use a Web-based client, such as Gmail, keep the e-mail tab in your browser closed except when you think it’s time to check it.
7. Use canned responses.
Most of us receive lots of e-mail messages about a few recurring topics. In dealing with many of them, you can save time by using boilerplate responses that contain such details as directions to your office, statements of policy, and information about important products.
If you use Gmail, check out the Canned Responses plug-in from Google Labs. This handy tool adds a dropdown menu to your e-mail interface, from which you can choose a number of text entries to toss into a message.
In Outlook, the Signature feature works in much the same way as Gmail’s Canned Responses. Create a separate signature for each boilerplate message, and then select it from the Signatures option when you need it.
With a few essential responses at the ready to drop into a reply, you can type a friendly salutation, insert your boilerplate, and hit Send.
These are just a handful of the many tactics that can make up a good e-mail management strategy. If you practice them diligently, you’ll be better positioned to pop open your inbox, tackle its contents, and get back to work. And when you sign off at the end of the day, you’ll have the comfort of knowing that you’ve dealt promptly and effectively with every message that came your way.
Got some good e-mail strategies of your own to share? Let us know about them in the comments area.