DAVID’S FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Processing your work is part of your work

I’m struggling with my impatience. I’m not as neutral as I’d like to be yet about how many professionals regard their inbox processing time as “extra” work that they can’t find time to do.

The stress many people feel can be directly attributed to the avoidance of daily and weekly catching up—with the flood of emails, voice mails, meetings, projects, and other informational and actionable items.

Most people behave as if this stuff is relatively unimportant. I argue that it’s where much of their primary value lies. Knowledge workers are paid to bring their intelligence to bear on input, and improve things by doing that. The decision about what to do with an email and its contents, what it means in terms of the work and standards at hand, is knowledge work.

Keep reading David’s article.

Subscribe to Productive Living. It’s free and sent about every 3 weeks. You’ll find essays from David Allen, thought-provoking quotes, and productivity tips you can use every day.

Want more tips from David Allen on managing email? Grab the free article: Getting Email Under Control.  There’s also a great webinar with the Coaches on GTD Connect on Managing Email.

A Community Contribution from Erik Hanberg

Here’s how I deal with email and keep from getting too overloaded:

1. I have one inbox. Everything goes to the same place (accounts either forward to Gmail or I’ve actually set Gmail up to reply from those accounts).
2. I only check email when I can reply to it easily. Unless I’m waiting for something specific, I try not to check email from my phone, because it’s a recipe for getting an email that requires a length reply that I don’t have the time to give on my phone. And that just stresses me out until I can reply appropriately.
3. I don’t use preview windows. It’s too easy to only get half the information and miss important stuff. When I used Outlook for work, this happened way more often that I would have liked. I thought it was a feature, but it turns out it wasn’t helpful at all. It made me browse email more than read email.
4. When I do check email, I start at the bottom and move my way up, going through email one at a time in the order sent. It’s the only way to know I haven’t missed anything.
5. I know my hot keys. By not using a mouse, I fly through emails much faster.
6. If I can reply quickly, I’ll do it right then. If I need to think on it, or know it will be a long reply with lots of edits, I’ll star it (a Gmail feature), so I don’t lose track of it. Alternatively, if you have folders, just move it to an Action folder.
7. Two or three times a year I’ll unsubscribe to newsletters I’m not using anymore. It’s amazing how easy it is to get onto newsletters without really trying.

Google says that Priority Inbox “automatically identifies your important email and separates it out from everything else, so you can focus on what really matters.”

So, what does David Allen say about this kind of tool and the questions about something that sorts your inbox being “anti-GTD?”

Having email sorting/filtering would be anti-GTD if you use it to avoid decision-making, but not if it’s just for evaluating what kind of attention to put on something. Using colors for certain people’s emails in  Lotus Notes (as I do) would also be “anti-GTD” if you never dealt with the non-colored ones. We’re not officially endorsing or recommending this.  Just saying it’s something that you can make work.  – David Allen

David’s reply: There are lots of articles and books written about some basic common sense stuff about email, including some of our own resources like our Setup Guides, Webinars on GTD Connect, and a free article I wrote on Getting Email Under Control.

Email is just like the phone or any other medium that takes a while for cultures and individuals to sift out their own best practices for their culture.  If email has value, that’s what it’s for.  If it doesn’t, don’t do it.  Don’t shoot the medium.  It’s just a channel for people communicating.  For me personally, I don’t like interruptions, when it could be in an email that I can deal iwth in my own timing.  If I want a warm fuzzy, email may not be the way to do that. All depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. People can use email to avoid work, just like they can walk down the hall to avoid work. The issue is avoiding work, not whether you’re doing it by email or by walking and talking.

There are a few excellent resources from the David Allen Company for applying the GTD methods to your email:

1. The GTD Setup Guides, specific to your tool, will cover the best practices of email.
2. There is a terrific free article called “Getting Email Under Control” that covers this issue as well.
3. Our GTD Connect online learning center also runs regular Webinar classes on topics such as email. There is a Webinar in the Archive Library called “Managing Email” that you should find useful. GTD Connect is $48 per month (cancel anytime) or $480 per year (one-year commitment.)
4. Our public GTD Mastering Workflow classes cover email best practices.  These one-day classes are a great way to learn all of the GTD essentials, including email.
5. There are loads of posts on GTD Times on the topic of email. Search on the keyword “email” or follow the tag.

]]> http://www.gtdtimes.com/2010/03/04/tips-for-managing-email-with-gtd/feed/ 1 http://www.gtdtimes.com/2010/02/23/getting-to-the-bottom-of-your-inbox/ http://www.gtdtimes.com/2010/02/23/getting-to-the-bottom-of-your-inbox/#comments Wed, 24 Feb 2010 00:33:20 +0000 GTD Times Team http://www.gtdtimes.com/?p=3353 Dear David Allen: Where do you find the time to go through the hardest parts of your Inbox (I seem to have a lower layer that never gets finished — notes from meetings that need follow up that are important but not urgent etc.)?

DA: You’re trying to use your Inbox as your organizer, and that won’t work. You have to make the decision about the action step for each one of those, and organize the reminder of the action (if it’s longer than 2 minutes and can’t be delegated) in your system. That doesn’t take long.  Sounds like you’re avoiding the decision about what to do, or you don’t feel like you have any system better than your Inbox to sustain it.

One of the upcoming Webinars with David Allen on GTD Connect will be all about processing these kinds of things that seem to get stuck in the Inbox.  Thursday, March 11th @ 11am.  Free for GTD Connect members.

Although they’ve been recorded for our GTD Connect online learning center, we have been posting the GTD Best Practices series to our free public podcast as well, for all to benefit from.  These informal podcasts are a great way to learn the essentials of GTD.  Here is the series:

Best Practices of Collect

Best Practices of Processing

Best Practices of Organize

Best Practices of Review

Best Practices of Doing

If you like these podcasts, GTD Connect has over 110 recordings like these, with more added every week, that you can play on the Connect site or  sync to iTunes.  It’s a great way to learn coaching tips from David and the staff, listen to interesting interviews with GTD’ers (Evan Taubenfeld being one of the recent ones), watch the “Slice of GTD Life” videos and more.  Good stuff.  Check out the free trial of GTD Connect.

It is a great thing to have this as the standard and comfort zone.  I would say in the last six months, I’ve consistently been here. What’s cool about GTD, is when you get here, it’s the starting point not the destination.  Can’t believe I’ve been using these tools since 1988.

My dear husband thinks you keep your Inbox to zero by not posting your email address on the internet and/or by having assistants respond to your email.  I disagree. What say you?

David responded:

You keep your Inbox to zero by dealing with whatever shows up in there as rigorously as you do your answering machine at home.  The access you give the world to create input is up to you.  You have to decide what you want to invite/allow into your world, and match that with a behavior to process it at the same speed.

Gmail Waiting For filter:

1. Create a label called @Waiting For if you don’t have one already
2. Go to Settings (top right corner), click on Filters tab
3. Click Create a New Filter
4. Add your email address to the From field
5. Add a unique keyword, such as *wf, in the Has the Words field
6. Click Next step
7. Check off Skip the Inbox” and “Apply the Label: @Waiting For”
8. Click Create Filter

Test it out by sending yourself a test message and put your unique code somewhere in the body of the message. What this will do is save you from having to cc: yourself (and then process it again out of In) or dig through Sent mail to get the stuff that you’re waiting on from someone else. A copy of your email will automatically get filed under your @Waiting For label.

Outlook Waiting For rule:

Here is how to create a very handy rule in Outlook for filing sent emails directly into a Waiting For email folder.

1. Create a new email folder (Ctrl+Shift+E) and name it @Waiting For.
The @ symbol will make it appear under your Inbox.
2. Click on Tools > Rules and Alerts.
3. Click the New Rule button.
4. At the top of the next box, select Start from a blank rule.
5. Highlight Check messages after sending, then click Next.
6. Check off With specific words in the body. Then click on where specific words is underlined and choose a unique keyword for your rule, such as *wf*. Click Add, then OK, then Next.
7. Check off Move a copy to the specified folder. Then click on the where specific Folder is underlined and choose the @Waiting For folder.
8. Click Finish.

Try it out by sending a test message to yourself and typing *wf* in the body of the email somewhere, such as under your signature file. It should send a copy of the email to your @Waiting for folder.  What this rule does is eliminate the step of having to CC: yourself or dig through your Sent file to find emails that you are waiting for a response.

David Allen’s answer: Essentially email is no different than paper or verbal communications, with the same weaknesses if things are unfocused, unclear, and/or unnecessary. Because of its accessibility e-mail has just magnified those problems when those standards in communication are allowed. The key is having a culture and relationships that have established (really) the best-practice standards, such as communicating on purpose, while respectful of others’ time and attention. Then it’s a lot easier to ensure that happens within all the media, including e-mail. If you don’t have those standards, I’ll bet it’s not just email that has those problems.

More resources on GTD & email:

• Becoming Master of your Email Inbox article
• Getting Email Under Control article
• The GTD Setup Guides
• Managing Email Webinar on GTD Connect

What standards have you, your team or your organization agreed upon to make email more effective and efficient?

For those of you on Gmail, here’s a handy guide from Google for getting the most out of Gmail.  A few years ago, (before Tasks was added to Gmail), our coaches were working quite a bit with a client on Gmail and wrote this free article on using Gmail as a list manager.  For all of the GTD Setup Guides, click here.

One of the best tricks for enhancing your personal productivity is having organizing tools that you love to use. – David Allen

1. Do what’s on them
2. Decide not to do what’s on them

You need time for processing and defining your work, just like you need time for doing what you’ve already defined, as well as time you need for choosing to do work as it appears.  So is David Allen suggesting a nice, neat little pie chart of 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 to spend your time?  No.  But everybody needs time for each one of these areas.  And technically, while reading email is part of defining your work, it can quickly teeter into doing work as it appears when you start using it as a distraction or procrastination technique to avoid what’s on your lists.

If you really don’t want to do what’s on your lists, checking email won’t solve that. I’d say you have a bigger issue to look at there called why are your lists repelling you?

There are two things I would look at:  Speed + Input

One angle to consider is to get really good and faster at processing.  Speed will be required when you’re getting tons of volume every day if you hope to get through it all without it consuming your entire day.

I think it’s also helpful to look at what you’re getting with a fresh eye, now and again.  Do you need to be getting everything you’re getting?

If you’re not sure, climb up the GTD Horizons of Focus, especially to the 20,000 level.  Is the input you’re collecting by email relevant to your current Areas of Focus and Responsibilities? If not, what can you renegotiate around any of that?  (There is an implicit agreement with the email you allow in.  Don’t allow in what you don’t want to give a piece of your attention to.)

For example:

• Get off email groups that don’t relate to your job, personal life or current interests.
• Even Junk takes time to process, so do what you can do eliminate mail that takes your attention that way. If unsubscribing is validating the email with the spammer, setup some smart mail rules for sending this stuff to a Junk or Trash folder.
• Unsubscribe from mailing lists that you don’t read anyway. Be honest with yourself on this. There’s a whole lot of value-add reading we all could be reading to improve our life, job, focus etc., that we don’t.
• Setup a “nice to read” folder to quickly triage the newsstand type items that you could read, or not. Just be vigilant in cleaning it out, like you would magazines on your table, when they expire in relevance and interest.  Emails have a shelf life, so be careful with this one.

If you are a GTD Connect member, there’s a great 2-minute video from David Allen on dealing with email that talks about all this in a really succinct and humorous way.

For many years I did GTD classes for a high-tech company in Silicon Valley where their engineers were getting close to 800 emails a day. That kind of volume takes some mastery to stay on top of, for sure.  So I hear you Gil when it seems daunting to deal with the volume that comes in for you.  I hope these tips give you something to work with.

The good news with the GTD model is that the thought process is the same no matter how something comes in (email, paper etc.) But since email plagues so many people, we’ll use that for our example.

1. Open a new email.

2. Ask yourself, “What is it?” and “Is it actionable?”

3.  If it’s NOT Actionable, then delete it, store it in a Reference email folder, or incubate it on Someday/Maybe if you think you’ll have action with it in the future.

4.  If it IS Actionable and will take you multiple steps to complete, ask yourself, “What’s my desired outcome?” Track that outcome on a Projects list.

5.  Now ask yourself, “What’s my next action?” Then you’ve got 3 choices:

1. Do it now (if it will take less than 2 minutes)
2. Delegate it now (if someone else can do it, track on Waiting For if you need to)
3. Defer it to a Next Action list or folder (if it will take longer than 2 minutes and store that email in a place (other than “In”) you know you can easily get back to when you need to take action.)

If it’s got multiple next actions that can be done simultaneously, track each one of those. If you have “future actions” or dependencies, and this is a project, those can be stored with your project plans.

So I’ve done pretty well in the last 9 months adopting GTD into my daily life.

I’m more productive, I’m happier, and I don’t feel like I’m ducking when I haven’t done something.

But I still have not totally grappled with one of the biggest challenges of the Information Age: Continuous Partial Attention.

Thomas Friedman joked in a column that we’re no longer in the Information Age, we’re in the Age of Interruption. And it’s exactly how I was feeling, I just kept getting interrupted.

The biggest challenges were inbound emails. Last month, when I started to realize the problem, I tried a novel solution: Gmail Lab’s “Email Addict” feature. It disables access to e-mail for 15 minutes in order to let you actually get something done. Should help my productivity, right?

Ha. Right.

At first, it did feel pretty good. But then the Gmail icon in my task bar lit up and the tab changed to Gmail – Inbox (1). Ooh, a message! But I couldn’t get to it!

I tried hitting escape. I couldn’t get back into Gmail. I tried hitting escape twice. Then I tried escape and then enter. Then the space bar. Then random panicked clicking.

Then I took a deep breath and decided to be Zen. I don’t need to look at it right now anyway, I told myself.

About 2 minutes the tab changed to Gmail – Inbox (2).

I couldn’t take it. I restarted Gmail entirely. I lasted all of 4 minutes with Email Addict.

The two emails that absolutely could not wait were a two-word reply to a meeting request and a coupon to Barnes & Noble … Not exactly worth it.

My attention was getting distracted by a lot more than just e-mail. I felt like I keep getting derailed by Google Reader, pointless refreshes of Facebook, and a constant stream of tweets (sometimes even tweets from David Allen himself!). Even my Google homepage–with all the customized content I’d put on there–was interrupting me with interesting links.

But of course they were interesting links! I’d selected those widgets because I liked the content, and now I couldn’t stop clicking. That’s when it dawned on me that every single interruption I faced was an interruption that I’d actually planned and created. I was my own undoing.

I set up my phone to ding when my friends twittered. I set up three different reminders that I had e-mail. I set up reminders all over the place that the blogs, sites, and people I like had new content online.

How stupid was I being, I wondered. It’s hard enough staying focused on the web when every headline, every advertisement, and every blue-underlined word is a potential temptation to get distracted. So why had I made my life even more difficult?

There was only one solution: purge the reminders. I scrapped the widgets on my Google homepage that had outbound links and left the rest. I disabled the Gmail Notifier on my laptop and made sure that when I was working my Gmail account up in a window separate from the one I was working in–so I can’t see the tab change when e-mail arrives. I turned Twitter updates off so my phone doesn’t buzz anymore.

The aim was not to reduce the collection of content. In fact, content feels like it collects faster in my reader and inbox because I check it less frequently now. The key was to reduce all the reminders that it was there. It’s helped keep me more focused. I “flit” between web pages much less often.

The two activities that pay the bills–writing and web coding–both go much better when I’m not getting pulled away all the time.

The lesson I’ve learned is that once I got my next action list under control and scrubbed away my mental clutter, I still had a lot of virtual clutter that needed my attention too. My advice to others is the same: you don’t need all those reminders. Let Google Reader gather the links you want and open it only when you want a break. Keep your e-mail in the background. If you can, turn off the feature that displays how many unread messages are waiting for you in the dock (Mac) or menu bar (PC).

The web is one of the few places where we can really manage distractions. We are in control of what we see and when we see it. Remember, you can only handle one thing at a time, even on the web.

For an interesting read on multi-tasking, I’ll refer you to Walter Kirn’s story in the November 2007 Atlantic. This short bit is key:

Through a variety of experiments, many using functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure brain activity, they’ve torn the mask off multitasking and revealed its true face, which is blank and pale and drawn.

Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires—the constant switching and pivoting—energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we’re supposed to be concentrating.

If you have an article you would like to submit to GTD Times, please let us know!

I love reading good prose, particularly a good narrative. Sometimes prose is called for in an email — to tell a story, explain your reasoning, provide some depth regarding your feelings on a topic, etc. Some people prefer the phone or face-to-face for those things, but in many situations, email is sufficient.

But many of the emails we send and receive every day aren’t this kind of content. They are instead heavily task-oriented — all about coordinating our work with other people. For these kind of emails, straight prose is generally a much less effective form of communication.

Over the years, as I’ve worked with people on communicating more effectively via email, I’ve observed that when people include more than one topic (even just two) in an email, all too often the recipient only replies to one of the topics. Then the sender has to reply back asking again about the overlooked issues.

Most people scan their email — they don’t read it closely. As a result, if there are action items, or items for which a specific response is expected from the other person, that needs to be clearly communicated in the email in a way that will still be effective knowing the recipient will likely just scan the email.

The solution? Numbered lists.

List each item that requires response or action with a number in front of it. You can then write a whole paragraph if you need to, but the numbered list accomplishes a couple of things:

1. Recipients are clearer as to what’s expected of them in terms of actions and responses. They can’t claim that it was buried in the email if it was specifically enumerated.
2. Recipients are less likely to skip an item when they respond. With the numbers, it’s easier to check for completeness of our response. If there are five items in the email, there should be five items in your response. I don’t claim this to be scientific — I just know it works.
3. If they skip an item, it’s easier to communicate back to them about it. “Thanks for your response, but what about item #2?” No retyping — just a single simple question.

A few tips:

1. Numbers work better than bullets. I don’t have quantitative data on this, but I can tell you that both for myself and with my clients, I first tried using bulleted lists, and that was a noticeable improvement over prose, but people still tended to skip items. But with numbered lists, skipped items in responses fall to almost zero. Apparently, without the numbers, our brain kind of loses place. Also, you lose advantage #3 above.
2. Bolding the start of each item helps. Whether it’s complete sentences or just a phrase as a pseudo-header, bold-facing the beginning of each item improves scannability.
3. Two items constitutes a list. How often have you sent an email with two questions for the other person and they only reply to one of them? It happens, and numbering them helps prevent it.
4. One list item = one action item. It doesn’t do much good to create a list if each list item has two or three questions or separate actions. Break it down.

This clearly isn’t appropriate for every email, even those longer than a paragraph, but in the proper context, this has been a great tool for me and my clients in reducing email traffic and confusion. Try it for yourself and see.

Managing the flood of email messages that most of us need to interact with on a daily basis is a growing challenge. No one’s volume is diminishing. That “beast is out of the barn,” and we’re not going to be able to shove it back in! So, getting a grip on it with a good systematic approach is critical for staying sane. If you are in the small minority of people currently able to maintain less than a screen-full of email most of the time (because your volume is low and/or you process them rapidly and consistently), your system is probably fine as-is. If you regularly have many more than that (hundreds, thousands?) residing in your email in-box, you’re dangerously subject to stress and numbness relative to your digital communication world.

Because of the volume of discrete messages and the speed with which they show up, email seems to be a unique demon, with a life of its own. In essence, however, email is no different than a desktop in-basket or an answering machine – it’s simply a collection box for incoming communication and information that needs to be assessed, processed, and organized as appropriate. And controlling email involves the same challenge as managing your physical in-basket – often too much stuff that we don’t have the time or inclination to process and organize as it comes in. So it easily becomes a swamp of “staged” or “pending” items – glanced at, perhaps even read, but not decided about or effectively organized (I have uncovered as many as 7,000 emails still festering in a client’s in-tray).
The Big Challenge
As email is simply an in-box, it needs to be emptied regularly to be maximally functional. “Empty” does not mean finishing all the work embedded in your emails – it means making decisions about what each one means and organizing it accordingly. The same procedures apply to any in-box – whether it’s the tray on your desk or your answering machine. They should be processing stations, not storage bins.
Because the volume in the computer is much greater than an audio or paper-based “in,” however, getting it to zero seems particularly daunting. But there is no light at the end of the tunnel if you are merely letting things pile up there. It takes less effort to start every day or two from zero in your in-box than it does to maintain “amorphous blobs” of accumulated and unorganized “stuff” that must continually be re-read and re-assessed for what they mean.
The Basics
We have seen hundreds of unique ways people have come up with to manage their email, and many work just fine – as long as nothing is lost, the inventory does not continue to increase, and someone can easily see the emails they need to take action on. Here are some basic procedures that commonly work for everyone:

Use the DELETE key! The ease with which we trash things from our physical mail doesn’t seem to translate to the computer for many people – perhaps because emails don’t take up much physical space and they are so easily parked somewhere that’s not immediately in our face. They’re taking up psychic space, however, and deleting everything that we don’t really need, as we encounter it, is crucial to managing the flood.

When in doubt, throw it out. If you’ve let emails pile up, purging is the first thing to do. Sometimes it is easier to clean house by clicking the “From” button which will sort them by their source – you can often dump several at a time that way.

File! Use a simple storage system for stuff you want to keep as archives and support information. If you’re a “when in doubt, keep it” person, that’s fine, but don’t have it clogging up your in-basket. Make reference folders in your navigator bar and file those kinds of emails over there. It’s a lot easier to lose track of them among the five hundred or a thousand in your in-box than in a folder you can name. And your Search function
can easily find most anything with a key word. Avoid using nested folders that you have to click open to find the file. One simple alpha-sorted list – by topic, theme, or person – is usually sufficient and easier to deal with on the run. Purge them when you have little windows of time with nothing better to do.

Complete the < 2-minute ones! The infamous two-minute rule is crucial for email management. Anything you can deal with in less than two minutes, if you’re ever going to do it at all, should be done the first time you see it. It takes longer to read it, close it, open it, and read it again than it would to finish it the first time it appears. In a heavy email environment, it would not be unusual to have at least a third of them require less
than two minutes to dispatch.

Organize emails that require action and follow-up! If you’ve deleted, filed, and finished your < two- minute emails, you’re left with only two kinds: (1) those that require more than two minutes to deal with and (2) those that represent something you’re waiting on from others. A simple and quick way to get control is to create two more folders in your navigator bar – “Action” and “Waiting For” and file them accordingly. These folders should be visually distinct from your reference folders and should sit at the top of your folder list, which can be accomplished by making them all caps with a prefix punctuation like the @ symbol or a hyphen (whichever will sort the folders to the top).

If you’ve deleted, filed, finished, or sorted your emails into action-reminding folders, you’re left with an empty in-basket. Now, at least, it will be much easier to review and evaluate a more complete inventory of your work at hand; and you’ll find it’s a lot easier to focus – on email or on anything else.

The On-Going Challenge
You must consistently review actionable emails. Once you get your in-basket to zero, it will feel fantastic. But you can’t ignore the batch of ACTION emails you’ve organized. The problem with computers as reminder tools is the out-of-sight-out-of-mind syndrome. If you’re not reviewing them regularly enough, they will start to on your psyche, creating even more avoidance and bad feelings. People leave emails in their in-basket to begin
with for the same reason they pile things on their desk, thinking, “If it’s in front of me, I won’t lose or forget it.”

Of course that seemingly practical habit of visual cuing is undermined by the volume and ambiguity of what’s in the piles. They create numbness instead of clarity. It’s much easier to assess your workload with actionable emails organized in one place. But it requires the good habit of checking on them regularly to feel OK about what you’re ot doing with them at the moment.

All this takes time and mental energy. Pretending that you can get email under control without dedicating the necessary personal resources to do it leads to frustration and stress. These best practices help make the process as efficient as possible, but the freedom that comes from having them under control is still not free. Just as people have learned to accept commute time as dues they pay to live and work where they’d prefer, you must integrate the time and energy to deal with email into your life and work style.

Customized Approaches
As personal management software has continued to evolve, in both the standard desktop as well as the myriads of creative small applications and add-ins, the possibilities for variations in how to manage email abound. They can be coded, colored, and automatically filed. They can be sorted by prioritized senders. They can be deferred for retrieval at later times. They can be transferred and melded into task and to-do management functions in other parts of the software.

If you set up and begin to get used to a simple folder system for actionable emails, you might find some specialized sub-categories useful. “Read/Review” can be a folder for FYI-type emails (though printed versions of long ones are easier to manage than on screen). “To Print” can be useful if you are not at a printer regularly. Some people find that taking the time to edit the subject lines of their own stored emails to reflect the specific action they need to take is useful.

Best Practices
But no matter how you tweak it or how cool the unique features and good tricks are that you might explore and even integrate as consistent functions into your personal system, the core principles of good workflow management must be followed to foster relaxed control of the beast:

Keep actionable and non-actionable emails in separate places. It’s too complex and stressful for your brain to constantly have to re-sort it every time it looks at it. A system works much better than your psyche for that. Emails filed in reference folders that still represent things to do produce anxiety; and email in the in-basket that is only needed for retrievable information will fog up your focus. Because most people don’t have a good action-reminder system per se, they are trying to make their reference folders a system for remembering what to do, and that never really works. If reference and action reminders are separate things, it allows much more freedom and ease with keeping as much reference material as you want – it simply becomes a library.

Keep it clean. Residue seems to self-generate but it doesn’t self-destruct! Delete what you can to begin with, and purge your reference files regularly, as things get out of date and lose their value to you. Keep them reviewed. As with any action-reminder system, if you don’t review and reassess the reminders of actions you might need to be taking, your mind will take back the job; and it doesn’t do that job very well. You’ll then avoid looking at your system and not really trust anything you’re doing because of the hidden greements with yourself you’ve neglected to re-negotiate.
Be good at the keyboard. We would be remiss in not reminding you of one of the most important factors in email management – how fast you type and how facile you are with shortcut keys and codes. Not only is poor typing speed inefficient, it creates a resistance to engage with email that undermines all the best intentions to get on top of it. If you’re not up to at least fifty words per minute, getting there with a good typing tutor could make a world of difference.

We recommend using the simplest approach you can get by with, adhering to these basic best practices, especially if you’re somewhat starting from scratch in getting this area under control. If you are relatively sophisticated in your email management already, and setting up more complex procedures for yourself has actually made it simpler, that’s terrific. The challenge though is to keep it current, complete, and consistent – and not requiring more time and thought than is worth the payoff you may get. Your process has to be so basic and almost automatic that you will maintain it even when you don’t feel like doing it.

Email, like any powerful tool, can be a blessing or a curse. And if the tool goes with the job, you need to invest in whatever it takes to use it wisely and safely. It is a huge productivity enhancer, but when it gets away from you, it’s a severe occupational hazard.