Email! I just love email! No, I don’t. Actually, my current definition of “rich” is having enough money that I can hire people to handle all my email and never have to touch a computer again. Been there. Done that.
If you want to make your email a supportive, carefree part of your life, like cat pictures or fluffy feather pillows or politicians, let’s explore how you can do that.
1. Throw Away Vacation Email
There’s nothing like going on vacation to take you out of the stress of daily work. And there’s nothing like coming back to an inbox of 23,917 messages to send your cortisone levels back through the roof.
Before you leave on vacation, turn on your vacation autoresponse message. Set it to say, “I’m on vacation. I’ll be back on January 10 and will immediately delete my email backlog unread. This is necessary for my sanity. If your messages is important, please resend it then.” Then do that. You’ll find that rather than being annoyed, most people will admire you for protecting your boundaries and not getting overloaded. And people with important messages will actually resend them when you get back.
2. Catch Up On the Most Recent Email from Each Thread
Of course, Jordan, that annoyingly perky new hire in the next cubicle, will ignore your vacation message and you’ll be included in a 93-message-long email thread about people bringing their cats to work.
Great! When you get back, delete all messages in the thread except the most recent. 99.99% of the time, people reply to a thread and include all the previous messages. To catch up, you just need to read the most recent message from bottom to top and you’ll be up to speed lickity-split. You’ll be ready to propose the Purrr-fect policy.
3. Don’t Use "Reply All"
"Reply All" replies to everyone who received the same message you did. Jordan listed 18 recipients. One was a senior manager Jordan wants to impress. Another was Jordan’s boss, so the boss knows Jordan’s on top of things. A third was the head of the sales department, who would correctly interpret the cat policy as being a metaphor for the impending power struggle as Jordan seeks to bring the entire company under control. And so on.
Only three of the 18 recipients will actually be affected by the policy. "Reply All" wastes the time of the other 15 people, and they’ll target you as the one wasting their time. When you reply, delete the 15 extra recipients and keep only the people who matter in the thread. Otherwise, part of the cat policy will end up being the co-location of litter boxes in your cubicle.
4. Force Inbox Zero
If you’re one of those devotees to the idea that you have to empty your inbox every day, my heart goes out to you. That means you let everyone except you decide how your time will get used. I hope that’s working for you.
If you want to get to inbox zero, select all your messages and delete them. DONE! Inbox zero! Now your compulsive self can pat yourself on the back and feel great!
Then browse through your junk folder and transfer just the messages you want to keep back to your inbox. You’ll rescue a few messages and respond to them. I call this "Delete Then Rescue."
For a full explanation of this technique, and to experience it performed in song by two professional New York musical theater actors, visit http://WorkLessAndDoMore.com and click the video link at the top of the page.
5. Check Email Deliberately
If you try for inbox zero, you probably have notifications turned on and visible badges, telling you when you have unread messages in your inbox. You see the badge appear and you go handle email. Don’t. Turn off notifications and badges, and check email at defined points during the day. Rather than becoming an interruption, make it a deliberate act.
If you choose not to do the whole Inbox Zero thing, hide the little badges so all those unread messages don’t distract you by showing up in the badge count. Then—you guessed it—check your email at defined points during the day.
6. Raise the Stakes
Being a digital native, Jordan will always be able to reply to your messages faster than you can send them. And Jordan believes you only exist to make their life easier. So Jordan expects replies to each of the 200 messages they send every day.
Build a barrier! Change your email signature to say “NEED TO REACH ME QUICKLY? Call [insert your phone number]. I only check email once a day.”
That’s because people use email as a way to be lazy. As soon as they have to move a finger, pick up a phone, and actually contract their mouth muscles, it’s way easier for them to answer their own question by Googling it for themselves.
By raising the stakes, you’re still making yourself available, but they have to be willing to use actual muscular movement and vocal chord contraction in order to get your help. This will reduce the number of unimportant demands on your time by 99.9999%. This has been my email signature for over a decade and I can count on one hand the number of times someone has called.
And because digital natives often have terrible phone anxiety, Jordan will need several years of therapy before picking up the phone and moving their lips, which will give you even more breathing room before you have to handle Jordan’s problem for them.
7. Tame Your Email
Email is a big part of our communications flow, but since other people send it, it forces us to attend to their priorities, not our own. Retake control of your email! Throw away vacation email. Catch up on threads from a single message. Don’t use reply-all. Delete-then-rescue, musically or not. Check email at defined times, with notifications turned off, and raise the stakes so when people want a response, they have to move muscles and maybe even talk.
Paper mail was easy to receive, and hard to send. Email is the opposite, and the Jordans of the world use it to shift the work from themselves to you. Push back against this monster of convenience, so your life can be about working less & doing more.
I’m Stever Robbins. Follow GetItDoneGuy on Twitter and Facebook. If you've taken a course and want to integrate what you learned into your actual behavior, check out my “Get-it-Done Groups” accountability groups. Learn more at http://SteverRobbins.com. Image of full inbox © Shutterstock.
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