Taming the email Tiger

Recently I had an email exchange with a reader who was feeling overwhelmed with the amount of email she was having to deal with. This is a common problem. Instead of being a useful tool, email becomes a monster that has us in its control.

I thought it might be useful to post the thoughts that I shared with her for wider reading:

I hope that your email inbox is subsiding or at least easing a little. There are many approaches to email that are really useful. One that I favour is from David Allen’s “Getting things done” which is a fabulous book on productivity. Well worth reading if you haven’t come across it.

He stresses that we need to be really clear that our inbox is not our work. Work may show up there, but that is not the place where we should be all day. It helps if we can regularly get our inbox to zero and stop using it as a space for holding things we haven’t done yet. If we use our inbox as a place to keep things until we get to them, we will be looking at the same emails over and over again. This wastes mental energy.

He suggests that we are disciplined about the time we spend on our inbox – and that when we are working on it we should be in “processing” mode. This means following the four “D”s:

• Do – if it will take less than 2 minutes do it, reply or whatever is needed.
• Delegate – if you are lucky enough to be able to, pass it on to someone
• Delete – get rid of it forever! Or file it forever!
• Defer – if it will take more than 2 minutes add it to your task list, and then file it in an action folder

I know it sounds really simple – but, using this technique I can process a huge number of emails in a short time. I also set a timer so that I don’t get carried away. I process like this for no more than 15 minutes at a time.

For the rest of the day, I can then focus on stuff that is in my task list system (I use Remember the Milk, a great app that sits on my laptop, phone and iPad).

One more thing – if you limit the time you spend on email to, say first thing and last thing in the working day, you can train others around you out of assuming that you will email reply immediately. It’s a bad habit that others get into and you can get caught up in. It’s particularly common in large organisations where people are constantly trying to prove something.

None of this is that sophisticated, but it should help to tame the email tiger.