All About Email Management
September 26th, 2008 by Andy Didyk
I’ve been MIA for a while now, because my wife just gave birth to the latest member of our family, Kaela Ruth. Our new daughter is incredibly beautiful and keeping me very busy.
I started this post a few weeks ago, and decided to finish it today while in the Atlanta airport. I watched this great Google Tech Talk video in which Merlin Mann of 43 Folders fame talks about how to better manage your email. The upside of me not blogging for a month is that I’ve had 30+ days to put these habits into practice, and let me tell you, it’s changed my digital lifestyle for the better.
The video is excellent, but it’s 60 minutes long. If you’d like the highlights and my opinion, then read on.
Here are seven philosophical points about the “whys” of controlling your email, rather than letting your email control you.
1. Knowledge workers make money by turning knowledge and information into value. You can’t effectively do this if your time is all tied up in pointless emails.
2. Where you decide to put your time and attention says a lot about who you are.
3. “Time and attention are finite, but demands on your time and attention are infinite”. You have to filter out what gets attention and what gets ignored.
4. Never check your email without “processing to zero” - actually doing something with the email you receive rather than merely “checking it”. In sum, you have to look at every piece of email in your inbox whenever you check your email, and you have to decide what to do with it. Not necessarily respond to every piece, but you have to make a decision about each and every one.
5. Once you’ve gotten the info that you’ve needed to from the email, it’s useless to you. Get rid of it!
6. Make your system as simple as you can stand it.
7. If you’re not in customer service or some other extremely time-sensitive email situation, then turn off your email app and only check your email once an hour, or less if possible. As much as you can, try to reduce the number of times you check it.
Mann then asserts that there are most 5 options that you have for processing a given email:
1. Delete it! (or archive it if it’s really something worth saving).
2. Delegate it. If you tell someone else to do it, set a reminder to yourself to ensure that it in fact took place.
3. Respond to it. This is a tough one for me to follow, because I’m a writer. But email isn’t the place to debut my next philosophical tirade. Mr. Mann suggests placing a line in your footer that states, “I will not write any email longer than 5 sentences”. If nobody reads long blog posts anymore, certainly in a business context no one reads long emails anymore. If it’s that long of a response, then schedule a meeting.
4. Defer it (will need a response, but could take additional time). I don’t know if I like this one. At least in my world, I can respond to most emails fairly quickly.
5. Do it. If something requires action from you, just get it done. If you can’t do it right now, schedule a meeting or reminder for it, and then it’s taken care of.
This has truly helped me to tame my inbox and to stop using it as a reminder system. I was very guilty of reading the emails when I didn’t have time to respond to them.
Anyways, it’s good to be back. I still have no idea why Google still refuses to index my blog, so I may go ahead and move it from a Wordpress platform to something else, or redesign it and see what happens. At any rate, it’s not like I’m selling ads or anything, so I’ll keep writing for now.
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