Your Inbox And Your Ego

I live in a world of emails and meetings.

I know I shouldn’t be – I should “visit” emails and meetings while being focused on long term strategy and new ideas to keep the business growing and evolving. 

It’s so easy to say that – and I have tried to step out of emails and meetings, only to find that I missed a deadline on an email or something extremely important came up in a meeting that I didn’t attend and I lost my ability to speak up and explain my side.  So I go back to the life of emails and meetings.

Here’s what’s hard about changing this.  IT’S EVERYWHERE.  It is how we now work in the United States.  People email people from across cubicles while they are staring at each other.  We use high priorities and “Following Up – URGENT” multiples times on an email thread but hardly ever pick up a phone – or crazier still – walk over to the person – and address the situation.  It’s a daunting statement to say that you are going to change how you work when most likely, everyone else around you will stay the same.

So let’s not make it so daunting.  I didn’t reinvent anything, however, I have tweaked how I look at my Inbox and although still new, it’s noticeable how it has become manageable and my anxiety is...focused on other things. 

1) I am a major unsubscriber although I have learned that I am a minority.  WHAT ARE YOU DOING?  Unsubscribe to everything that doesn’t serve you and learn a lesson in FOMO.  The world will not end if you did not get an email about France & Son having a sale. 

*Side note – I use Microsoft Outlook so what I do is geared more toward Outlook than Gmail – Outlook just launched a Clutter tab which is also great for all of your subscriptions to aggregate in one place in case you can’t part with them – you can dedicate time once a week to go through. 

2) Re-design your calendar.  Schedule time every week in your calendar for emails.  Treat it like a meeting and block it out as time every day to focus on nothing but your inbox.

3) Inbox zero was a BIG THANG that kept popping up while I was researching this topic.  For me, it’s not yet imprinted as a must BUT the takeaway that resonated with me the most is the theory that if an email is going to take longer than 15 minutes to respond to then it is no longer an email. 

What. In. The. World.

Here’s the concept: if an email takes longer than 15 minutes to respond to, that email has evolved into a Project and must be treated differently.  I was scheduling these projects into my calendar, but I was finding that I wasn’t honoring the time.  My new system is using Microsoft One Note – again, this is an Outlook thing that looks really similar to the Notebook layout in Word.  I have tabs set up Monday – Friday where, once I hit a project, I place it into the appropriate day to make a needed deadline, with the rule that I can only have five projects a day in OneNote.  Before I start my emails for the day, I instead tackle the five projects in my OneNote.  The deleting of each project after I have finished it is the most magical thing to me – makes me feel so accomplished without it looming in my Inbox.

4) Reading emails.  I organize by category and look at categories before I get to new emails; categories for me are emails that are pending a response from someone else and I want to make sure these take priority so I can close the loop. 

Once those have been reviewed, I move on to either the emails of the current day OR the oldest day if I am behind – I want to be able to catch up from the back to the front. 

Finally, before I read or answer the email, I organize by subject to aggregate all emails into the same thread so I can make sure I am responding to the most current piece of information – not to mention, deleting 15 emails in one thread all at once feels sooooo great. 

*Side note: If you are using Gmail, it has a feature to automatically do this to your emails.  It takes a little getting used to, but when I was using Gmail at a previous company, it was my go-to.

There you go.  Four small things I changed that are working for me.  If this makes your emails 10% better than before you had read this, then I have done my job.