Back from the brink

… of email bankruptcy.

My email has been the bane of my workday existence for some time, and I decided that I needed to fix the situation. Over the last few days I’ve finally winnowed all the crap out of my inbox. Filed stuff, deleted other stuff, and basically tidied up. I’m really glad to have done this, but am amazed/slightly depressed at how long it took me.

I listened to Merlin Mann‘s talk to Google employees this morning, on managing your email: “Inbox Zero”. I obviously need to work smarter with my email to make sure my email doesn’t get out of control again – which is why I’m glad I listened to this talk.

Merlin says:

Email used to be a “network of hugs” – way back in the ’90s when only a few people had email and you didn’t need to worry about ever getting that much of it. (This made me nostalgic…) Now it’s an “avalanche falling on your head every morning”. It’s become the “lingua franca for how you deal with your life” and everything comes through email.

For knowledge workers (people whose jobs involve working with information and adding value to it), time and attention are the two most important and finite natural resources in the day. Others’ demands on these are infinite. Where you decide to put your time and attention says a lot about who you are.

Quotes Joel Spolsky (a programmer) – the amount of available time and effort as represented by a box. Every task you add to the box is a block – can be big or small, but every block you add takes up room, even if it’s a “crap block”. Ultimately you want to make sure you don’t put “stupid blocks in the box, otherwise you have to worry about getting it out”.

Email is just the medium. There is no need to live in your email.

“Process to zero” every time you check your email; that is, every time you check your email, you do something with it – take action (even if that action is to delete that email).

Suggests five verbs – to process everything in your email inbox. Don’t let it stack up in the inbox. Decide what you need to do with it, then move on. Just checking is not enough! Think: what action do I need to take with this email?

Delete (or archive)
Delegate
Respond
Defer
Do

Don’t let the email remain in your inbox without doing something with it – leads to procrastination.

Points out that if you leave your email on all day, every time you can have 2,400 interruptions in a week. Suggests “email dashes”, checking email at set times a day, eg checking once per hour, processing for 10 minutes, then switching off to do stuff. Also suggested not keeping your aggregator on all day as it just adds to the interruptions (I’ve already found this; I try and read my feeds only when I need a break, otherwise I could spend all day reading feeds).

Keep your archiving system simple. No need for complicated taxonomies to classify your messages, after all you’re “not a librarian” [laughter from audience]. (Merlin, even librarians don’t and can’t have complicated systems for archiving email – there’s too much of the damn stuff and it would be a full time job!)

Learn to deal with email very quickly. Challenged the audience to write short emails – cited the five sentences website. Keep things moving. If you can’t respond quickly, because you need more information, put it in a separate To Do folder. The inbox should only be for messages you haven’t read yet. (I don’t know if I can always write very very short emails – but this is a good reminder not waffle in email, and to get to the point quickly.)

Keeping on top of my email is going to be an ongoing challenge, but hopefully I can use some of these strategies to keep that darn inbox under control.