Helping decrease your stress with better inbox management strategies and tools
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How quickly do you expect people to reply to your email messages?
More importantly, how quickly do you respond to messages in your inbox? Do you try to get back to people as soon as possible, or do you let messages linger for days or even weeks? Most of the advice I’ve read on the subject suggests trying to respond as quickly as possible, because it fosters a reputation of reliability, and paints you as someone who is on top of things. I tried that when I was working as a project manager, and it definitely succeeded on both counts. Also, because I can be a bit obsessive, sticking to the instant-reply strategy justified living in my inbox and keeping it empty.
Of course, eventually I learned that there are downsides to this strategy. I found that I was spending all of my time monitoring my inbox and batting away incoming messages like tennis balls shooting at me from machines on the other side of the net. Getting each ball over the net was more important to me than really considering my responses and sending the bestresponse back that I could. And while I was busy bouncing away the incoming messages, not much real work was getting done. I’d go home for the day feeling exhausted, but not able to think of anything productive that I accomplished during the day.
What was even worse was the fact that the incoming messages seemed to be getting more and more frequent – coming at me faster and faster. I was training people that I was someone who delivered fast responses, so they quickly learned that if they wanted something done, they should ask me first. A lot of the email I was getting was only marginally related to my job, and yet I was fielding all sorts of requests for my time because I’d cultivated a reputation as someone who was reliable and quick to respond. But my actual responsibilities were suffering, and my stress level was through the roof.
It’s fine to respond quickly if the answer is top of mind and you don’t need time to consider it. But don’t be afraid to sit on an email for a day or two if you need to decide the best way to respond. In many companies email has become almost real-time, and people expect you to have read and considered messages that they sent you only minutes before. That culture is toxic. Your instant messaging client doesn’t have an inbox because it’s a real-time tool. Email does, because it’s intended as a place for messages to gather while you’re not actually “doing email”. In other words, email was never intended to be real-time. It’s not unreasonable to let people learn that while you might not always answer immediately, your answers will be considered and of a high quality.
Another benefit of sitting on a message for a little while before replying is that the sender may actually be able to solve their own problem if they give it a bit more time. Or another recipient who is better suited might respond. This isn’t to say that you should be a jerk about it, but if you’re overwhelmed, remember that you control your time, not the people who send you email.
There’s definitely a balance to strike here, since you want to be a reliable correspondent, while protecting your time to give yourself the room to actually think, and do real work.
It’s easy to forget this, and I often do, but doing email isn’t doing work.
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Help! My inbox is overflowing, what do I do?
Hopefully I’ve convinced you that you need to get to an empty inbox. But if you’re staring at a seemingly insurmountable mountain of messages… what can you do?Okay, it’s time for a reality check here. You need to admit that you’re probably not going to get to those important messages buried somewhere in the pile. And if you do, it’s not going to be by accidentally seeing them in the list, but rather because you actually went looking for a specific message.
So, given that, what you’re going to do is take everything that is currently in your inbox, and move it into your new Archive folder. You can still search for messages in your archive, so it’s really no different from having them in your inbox, except you’ll now be able to easily see the new items that come into your inbox, and anything that is important enough to not archive it right away.
Some people struggle with this idea because it feels like you’re just cramming a bunch of unorganized stuff into a closet. The thing is, almost all modern email programs contain sophisticated search functionality that makes it easy to find a needle in the haystack. Your closet, on the other hand, does not. And even though you haven’t methodically organized this pile of messages, the truth is that you were never really going to anyway – you were just going to feel bad indefinitely about the fact that you hadn’t organized them.
By the way, this method of cleaning house works well for cluttered computer desktops or download folders too. Just burn a CD or DVD containing with everything that is sitting on your Desktop or in your Downloads folder, date the disc, and set it aside. I’m willing to bet you’ll never actually need it, but if you do it’s there.
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Why is the goal an empty inbox?
To truly get a handle on your email communication, you need to have a goal of emptying your inbox regularly. When asked why they do it, most people who keep everything in their inbox respond with, “I can’t delete it; what if I need it?”The problem with this kind of thinking is that it doesn’t scale. If you are only receiving 5 email messages per day, then sure, you can probably keep everything in your inbox and find the items you need when you need them. But if you start receiving 50 email messages per day, that gets a lot harder, very quickly. I would argue that even if you only receive 5 emails per day, you should still empty your inbox as a habit, because your email volume will invariably increase over time. Good habits are just as hard to break as bad ones are, so instill good ones now.
Sure, but you haven’t answered the question: Why?
The thing is, you really don’t need most of those old messages, but having them hanging around is making it really hard to find the stuff that you actually do need. Don’t worry, I’m not going to suggest that you throw them out; in fact, I have every single email message that I have sent and received for the past almost 10 years. The point here is that you need to archive the non-actionable emails (anything that doesn’t require you to follow-up on it in some way), so that it’s not in your inbox. Don’t worry right now about where it goes, just make a folder called Archive. Gmail has a beautiful built-in system that allows you to press an Archive button to instantly remove a message from your inbox, but keep it forever in an easily searchable archive. If you’re not using Gmail, you can mimic this behaviour by simply creating an Archive folder and getting into the habit of moving any messages from your inbox into it once you’ve read them.
Okay, but is that it? This is just about making it easier to find things?
No, not exactly. It’s actually about helping you breathe easier when you look at your inbox. If you’ve been coping with an inbox that is crammed full of messages, it’s likely that some part of your brain cringes every time you look at it, or maybe you feel guilty about all of those messages buried somewhere in there that at one time felt important (and maybe still are). If you’re reading this site, it’s likely that you feel that you have a problem, but the idea of having an empty inbox as a goal seems too far-fetched, scary, or crazy. Truthfully, it takes some work to get there and stay there, but once you do it you will feel a level of relief, and you will even find that over time it takes less effort than living with the clutter of thousands of unimportant or unnecessary messages.
If you’re still not convinced, I’d invite you to read an essay I did five years ago at my personal blog. In it, I take a slightly less diplomatic approach, which can be seen right in the post’s title, If Your Inbox has More than a Screenful of Messages In It, You’re Rude.
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What is the Inbox Era?
Welcome to the Inbox Era.Having worked in very email-centric organizations in the high-tech industry for the past 10+ years, I’ve become accustomed to dealing with a very high volume of email. For years I’ve tried to discuss my trials and tribulations with dealing with the onslaught of information coming at me via my inboxes with my friends and family, only to find them a little bewildered. They simply weren’t experiencing the same issues.
However, in the days leading up to 2010, if there’s one new year’s resolution I’ve heard from those same friends and family more than any other, it’s an intense desire to get their inboxes under control.
Maybe I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. I suppose you’re wondering just who the hell I am, and why you should listen to me when it comes to learning how to better manage your email?
My name is Jason Clarke. I’m a 34 (almost 35) year-old father of 3 young children, and devoted husband. I’ve been blogging for 7 years, including 5 years writing for the AOL-owned publications Download Squad and TUAW. My day jobs for the past 10+ years have all been in the software industry, as an Implementation and Support Technician, Software Test Engineer, Project Manager, and currently hold the positions of Manager of Technical Services and IT Manager for a Vancouver-based software company.
When dealing with software people, one thing quickly becomes clear: they like to communicate via email. And the only people who I know that like to communicate via email more than software people are technology bloggers. So, given that I’ve spent the better part of the past 10 years involved in both camps, I’ve become accustomed to managing an average of 100-200 new emails per day, per group. That’s 200-400 emails per day, typically. And sometimes it’s worse – much worse.
Just think what that means.
If I receive 200 email messages in the course of a notional 8-hour work day, that means that I get an average of 2.4 minutes to handle each email message. And that’s assuming I do nothing but deal with email all day! Of course, many of those emails are one-liners requiring no more than 30 seconds to read and file or delete, but that is balanced out by the multi-page screeds that must be truly studied.
Now consider that the blog-related email I receive is at the same volume, and must be dealt with in my own time. I certainly don’t have another 8 hours in my day for non-business email, never mind any personal messages I get.
I must be absolutely crushed under the weight of all of these incoming email messages, right? Well, if I’m honest, yes… sometimes I am. But, most weeks my inbox is completely emptied at some point, often many times during the week. That’s right – zero messages in any of my inboxes.
If this seems impossible, it’s not. And if you’re struggling to tame your inbox, I’d like to help you get it under control.
©2010. Postage by Greg Cooper. Icons by P.J. Onori. Thanks to Jamie Cassidy & Panic.
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